Production: Reproduction of instruments captures tone and rhythm with precision in a live styled setting.
Review: To create metal more extreme than the previous generation of simple and savage black metal, Mayhem at first built crude and incoherent songs but developed an aesthetic of primitive, ugly, mechanical riffs shaped from crude and masticatory musical antitheses. Their relentless, chaotic, and masterfully rhythmic collection of riffs support a cast of simple songs which use the tradition verse-chorus dichotomy of simple heavy metal - black metal as a polarized backdrop upon which oppositional rhythm and symmetric complements of phrase can counterplay.
Tracklist:
1. Funeral Fog
2. Freezing Moon
3. Cursed in Eternity
4. Pagan Fears
5. Life Eternal
6. From the Dark Past
7. Buried by Time and Dust
8. De Mysteriis dom Sathanas
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Copyright 1994 Deathlike Silence Productions
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Where Mayhem shine is in tendency of these riffs which reveals a hardcore derivation to much of this: disconclusive, anti-symmetric riffing which follows ambient simplicity to author multiple combinations in the same overall rhythmic support. Their songs tear into musical wounds as elemental as the pieces of a scale and leave them more ambiguous than before, creating in this darkened haze of composition an opening for the nihilistic mechanism and romantic melody of the highest level of artistic opposition.
Although melodramatic and overextended by the hilariously violent and strikingly operatic vocals of Tormentor throatman Attilla, these songs are as savage as with the inhuman torrential scream of Dead, previous vocalist and celebrated suicide, and in this more controlled recording highlight the percussion of Hellhammer, simple rock-grindcore fusion blasting with the fastidious surgical precision of a serial murderer.
Periodically Euronymous inserts by-now classic pentatonic and atonal lead guitar, wandering through tempos and tones like a lost spirit obssessed with the night; consistently the attraction of this band however is his deadset wrist rhythm guitar, which varies from fast rippling blast-riffs to grating, intimidating, recursive doom minimalism.
Lyrics from previous vocalist Dead accompany the morbid processional of seemingly random but strikingly integrated power chord riffs, emphasizing the beauty and distinction of the abstract state of the unliving mind. Without really going much farther than the first generation of black metal or adding musical complexity, Mayhem innovated a style which inspired many others; their primary contributions of rhythm guitar remain unmatched today for severity and concussive resolution.
The studied reduction of songs from collection of these riffs to expressive structures with individual centering principles, however, is where Mayhem create their masterpiece and underline their fundamental concept of violent beauty and power in death.
The Freezing Moon, written by DEAD (RIP) in '88
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Everything here is so cold
Everything here is so dark
I remember it as from a dream
In the corner of this time
Diabolic Shapes float by
Out from the dark
I remember it was here I died
By following the freezing moon
It's night again, night you beautiful
I please my hunger on living humans
Night of hunger, follow it's call
Follow the freezing moon
Darkness is growing, the eternity opens
The cemetary lights up again
As in ancient times
Fallen souls, die behind my steps
by following the freezing moon
