I'm kinda sick of all this hillbilly music for the moment, so I'm gonna take a break from taking a break from metal and go through a few albums that I've been meaning to listen to for a while now. So first up is...
Mayhem: Live In Leipzig
I've never really been the biggest fan of Mayhem's music. I think that if it weren't for their outrageous band history they would be just a footnote in metal history. But their band history
does make them sort of unforgettable. Murder. Suicide. Church burnings. Possible cannibalism. What more could you want from an extreme metal band? This is a live album featuring their former vocalist Dead who, ironically, is now dead. The aforementioned suicide. He is generally regarded as their best vocalist and this is the only official recording he appears on, which is why this live album is so (in)famous. The version of "Necrolust" on this album is actually the first Mayhem song I ever heard, but I've never listened to the whole thing before, so here goes...
P.S. I'd just like to mention that Dead sort of gets forgotten in the wake of the whole Varg/Euronymous/stabby stabby thing, but he's a nutbag worthy of note in his own right. Among other stories he used to bury his clothes in the ground before a show so that they would smell like the grave, he had a dead crow that he kept in a plastic bag that he would inhale from before shows, apparently he even kept a dead guinea pig in his pocket because...who knows? My kinda dude.
Alright, basically when you take Mayhem out of the studio you lose the atmosphere and get even more noise. The s
hitty production doesn't help. Of course, this is black metal after all, so what do you expect? It's sometimes entertaining noise, but you'd have to be a legitimate Mayhem fan (i.e. stupid) to really like this. Dead
is a much better vocalist than Attila though. Or at least he doesn't sound like the B-movie version of an extreme metal vocalist. I'm gonna give this some more time to sink in, but I'm not expecting much.
If I had to say that this album had a selling point it would be that Mayhem often sounds like a two dimensional band who only knows how to make noise and do blast beats on
De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. On this album, this is sort of buried in the noise. They definitely sound like a band who only knows how to play noise, but the energy of a live show gives this a hardcore punk quality (which could actually just be down to them being a terrible band who can't even play their songs) that makes them sound less goofy if no more listenable. Like on
Mysteriis when they decide to slow down and quit with the two dimensional noise they don't actually sound too bad. "Freezing Moon", "Pagan Fears", "Chainsaw Gutsf
uck" (best song name ever), and "Pure F
ucking Armageddon" actually sound pretty kewl at times. But yeah, I'm sort of glad I didn't waste fifteen bucks on this when I saw it at FYE that one time.