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MAYHEM
Esoteric Warfare

Season Of Mist (2014)
Rating: 8.5/10

Boy does it seem an aeon or so ago that Mayhem’s 1987 debut EP Deathcrush was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. So much has happened since those dark times, and yet with 2000’s Grand Declaration Of War album I still admired the Norwegian band for their sheer arrogance and cold, cutting dark metal.

Since then, however, there have been more changes with the climate, and with 2007’s Ordo ad Chao as well as Attila Csihar being back in the band (replacing Maniac), things looked to have been a touch murkier sound wise for these true legends of the damned. But unfortunately, Ordo ad Chao was not the sizzling return to form I had hoped for.

So, following another considerable gap between studio releases we are offered Esoteric Warfare, a ten-track outing that boasts several memorable and monstrous numbers. This includes the bludgeoning oddity that is ‘Psywar’, with its thrashy outburst resulting from the skin bashing of Hellhammer, who true to form clatters the life out of a pig’s head until it is an unrecognisable heap of mush.

This is Mayhem at their fastest, yet still darkly sublime enough to inject those more cosmic strains and devilish whispers before Necrobutcher’s bass comes hurtling into the ears with the subtlety of a caveman waving a club. Say what you want about the Mayhem brand, but the sound is an icily distinctive one blessed with natural arrogance and a smirk that casts long shadows over the competition.

The album also features the brutal ‘Trinity’, which chugs and rattles through the night sky like a fleet of spectral airships whose only aim is to take the land in one destructive swoop. Attila Csihar’s vocals, as they always have been, are a watery, indecipherable gurgle of utmost evil born from some foetid lair back in the Norwegian wastes. Whether through gloomy forest or industrialised terrain, Mayhem produces the same gargantuan growls and cock-sure nastiness we’ve come to expect.

The quartet resorts to doomier conflict with ‘VI.Sec.’, its sprawling masterpiece of frost-ridden segments being the result of those twisted guitars and smothering vocals. This is pure blackened doom metal of the highest esoteric order, but the way it transforms into a perverse medley of machine gun percussion and whining, oil-laced chords is remarkably nefarious.

This is Mayhem at their most diverse, but as with the eerily gloomy ‘Pandaemon’ and the debauched chords of ‘Corpse Of Care’, Mayhem do what they want and when they want, leading the listener into a fog-enshrouded mire of danger and devilry last heard so raw and primitive on those old Hellhammer and Celtic Frost records. For me, the masterful Mayhem is a continuation of Celtic Frost’s bizarre brand of dark worship; a band who still frighten the bejesus out of us with their dank, unearthly offerings.

Esoteric Warfare can never replicate the distant gleams of 1994’s debut full-length De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, but just one trip into the ghoulish stratosphere of, say, ‘Throne Of Time’ or ‘Posthuman’, and you’ll realise why Mayhem are such a mighty force even in their death-like silence between releases.

Neil Arnold

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