This is basically more of the same from BATHORY. Don’t worry though, this is a good thing. If you weren’t old enough to hear them at the time, you need to imagine a time when there was only Venom, Hellhammer (later Celtic Frost) and Bathory. Bathory The Return was released in 1985 and provides the listener with another dose of the raw Black Metal this group helped pioneer. The main difference between this and the first is the improved production, and better musicianship. This meant the album was a lot more listenable to most ears, though that at point it still would have been only the more extreme metalheds who would have been buying this. The riffs on this sound sharper than the previous album and the songs a lot more digestable. You could now actually hear what was going on properly and actually appreciate Bathory for what they were. With this second album, Bathory was now a real player in the extreme metal scene and their influence was starting to spread.
This album still has that similar “Black Metal Recorded in a toilet” sound that most early black metal had become known for and to be fair main man, Quorthorn did record this in a garage he had called “Heavenshore Studio’s” on either a four or 8 track cassette recorder with only the most rudimentary of recording technology. Musically this is still the Bathory everyone who bought the first record knew but with the clearer recording you could hear the bands potential a lot more than you could on their debut album. To my ears a lot of the punk stuff that was present on their first album seemed to have been dropped on this and it seemed to be a more focused metal (Black Metal) release.
Overall, this is a great slab of extreme heavy metal and definitely a bit of a history lesson as well. While the album only sold at the time to a small but committed core of metalheds, the myth of Bathory has continued to grow with each subsequent release and as a result the re-issues of these early albums has amassed some deceet sales figures as the black metal community grew in size and interest in the original creators of the art grew. As cool as this album is, it was only a precursor to what Bathory would unleash next…
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