Mayhem

Lately my steady diet of death metal has begun to pale somewhat. Not even the old chestnuts like "Corporeal Jigsore Quandary" (not "Corporal") or "Incarnated Solvent Abuse" seem to get the job done. You wouldn't think something as energetic and brutal as Corporeal Jigsore Quandary would ever trigger ennui, but by gum, it did. And let's not even talk about my substantial collection of melodic death metal. If Morbid Angel and Carcass aint cutting it, what chance does, say, At The Gates or In Flames have?

But the other day my iPod shuffled up out of its depths the old Darkthrone "Transilvanian Hunger" followed immediately by that Carpathian Forest deal whose name I can never remember but which involves a lot of crying and shouting and someone whispering something I can never make out but which nevertheless sounds exceedingly evil and ominous (I think it's "Black Shining Leather").

Black metal, in other words, and it was just what I needed, at least for this week. Next week I'll probably think differently, but this week, it's the black metal playlist end-to-end (consisting chiefly of Carpathian Forest, Darkthrone, Burzum, Satyricon, Enslaved and Ulver - I own but so far haven't developed much of a taste for Emperor or its descendants, Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth). Owning albums like Nemesis Divina, Filosofem, Bergtatt and Transilvanian Hunger gives one a pretty good claim to having benchmarked black metal, but it struck me that there was one classic album I'd never bought - Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. So I bought it, and I like it musically even though the vocals still make me chuckle. They're as goofily over the top in the black metal style as, say, Morbid Angel's are in the death metal style (but having said that, I still prefer them to that guy in Carpathian Forest - he sounds so much like he has his testicles snarled in a sausage grinder he makes me wince and cringe).

But I like Mayhem's riffitude, though "riff" isn't a word normally associated with black metal. It's a good compromise between various styles. The sound isn't as minimalistic as Darkthrone, but it's not as lush and overdone as Dimmu Borgir. It's fast in the same way that Darkthrone is fast, but it doesn't sound so thoroughly tremolo-picked and hashed-up; sometimes it reminds me strongly of Carpathian Forest (though without that weird galloping bass) or even Burzum, though not nearly as meditative (or as narcoleptic). And it avoids the most common failing with a lot of black metal, the fact every song sounds alike (I remain convinced that Darkthrone only wrote one song and everything we've heard from them since amounts to nothing more than process variation.)