By the time black metal and death metal made it back, the actual inspirations — Slayer, Hellhammer, Sodom, and Bathory — were almost forgotten in a rush toward the new style that was birthed from combining their approaches. Now the history fleshes itself out a bit.
For most of us, Bathory seemed like a 1980s thing and by the following decade was acknowledged more as history than an active force, since Blood Fire Death was its last really solid release that could be listened to as a whole without drop-outs in consistency.
Many of us point out that the self-titled, The Return……, and Blood Fire Death were the most consistent, with the critic-praised Under the Sign of the Black Mark falling short as a listening experience despite having many great ideas.
Perhaps this was an influence on the Norsk black metal movement which tried for quasi-concept albums where there were no anomalous songs or drops in quality. If you design an album as a whole experience, it intensifies the power of each song as well.
However, to deny the influence of Bathory on not just black metal but death metal seems foolish because two years after Discharge and one after the first Slayer album this Swedish band was making the closest approximation of the black metal to come that could exist so far in advance of it.
Luckily metal journalist Jose Luis Cano Barron has compiled mostly from fanzines and websites an in-depth history of Bathory despite there being many gaps. Its strength is its detail and its timeline made around the albums, and its weaknesses are its style and the inevitable gaps.
That sound was the result of the fall of the western Judeo-Christian civilization in which they had grown and been immersed, not even having asked for it. The Swedish band represented the sonic expression of every day’s chaos, and also served as a medium to escape from the madness and oppression to which those teenagers had been submitted. Many renounced their Christian faith after having listened to Bathory’s albums, inspired by the band’s anti-Christian, even iconoclastic and nihilistic, stance. (35)
Designed partially for record collectors, since the latter third of the book is a complete and detailed history of the Bathory albums by release that enumerates variations between each pressing, From Hades to Valhalla: Bathory The Epic Story shines mostly on the first five albums.
Since the chapters are organized around the Bathory releases, this makes it easy to extract tantalizing glimpses into the early years of the band but more importantly into the mental state of Quorthon and his influences, inspirations, and fascinations that fueled the music even more than his favorite bands.
On top of that, Twilight of the Gods had some inspiration from the writings of the controversial Nietzche, a German philosopher praised by supremacists, especially German ones. Surely the album title came from there as well. (77)
A great deal of the text goes into answering questions about Bathory that cropped up in the intervening years. Quorthon was less visible after Hammerheart and died only a decade after black metal imploded, but even more, was selectively very secretive about his origins and ideas, even cryptic.
Consequently Barron has stitched together a narrative of anecdotes and Bathory lore loosely correlated to a timeline built around the albums. That works for most of us Bathory fans who know the basics, accept that there is a lot we will never know, and just want some idiosyncratic detail.
Like the production on the first Bathory albums, this obscurity creates a stronger message in the form of implied backstory which can never be known but which emerges from the many data points blending together into fuzzy shapes which seem to form patterns.
For example, we may never know what Quorthon actually listened to growing up. We know of a few bands that are mentioned. We know he later turned to classical music, or maybe we tuned into it the whole time.
Nevertheless, the visionary creativity of Quorthon kept expanding its horizons even more, feeding off a strict diet of cultured music that ranged from Vivaldi and Bach to Wagner and Stravinsky, not to mention more modern authors like Samuel Barber or Anton Bruckner. In fact, since Bathory’s early years, Quorthon had become so engrossed in listening to a lot of classical music that even Boss began to take a liking to it, something Börge had not previously been accustomed to. Quorthon’s tape collection of this type of music is legendary, which was the result of his visits to the local library from which he could make copies as needed (49)
The discursive style of this book like the poetry of Southern Europe specializes in ambiguity and lengthy discussion which elicits a few hints and suggestions but never makes a strong statement. It is like someone discussing a discussion about Bathory, but it works.
It lets the plot points that we do have pop out of the page, such as the Motörhead influence that inspired Bathory in lieu of Venom, the hardcore punk influences since the beginning, and the flirtation with Satanism merely as a metaphor for really hating Christianity.
This text is more circular than rambling, and through the commentary Barron promotes possibilities to the level of near-certainties, such as what Quorthon was thinking in his various breaks from his previous style, even though the fans always wanted simply The Return…… repeated.
From Hades to Valhalla: Bathory The Epic Story makes for an engrossing, flavorful read and may kick-start interest in this founding band in the generation before underground metal. It may also answer most of your remaining questions about Bathory and remind us why this band remains enigmatic decades later.