I remember the first time I heard Mayhem. It was probably November of 2009, and I was sitting on the floor in my room in my home town, my laptop on the floor beside me, wrapping a Christmas gift for my mom (Yes, it was early. I was living at home that year and I wasn’t home when she wasn’t very often. I had to seize the moment). I had just begun to delve deeper into black metal that wouldn’t get me made fun of, and I’d been marveling at Marduk and jamming out to Immortal on Pandora all day. And I had heard about Mayhem (I’d heard PLENTY; 21 year old me was pretty squeamish, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about the whole thing), but I had a hard time imagining that they could really be all that good. After all, they were famous for dying prematurely, yes?
And then Funeral Fog came on my Pandora station. It was love at first blastbeat. I grabbed my laptop, and by the time the song was over, Amazon.com was processing my order of De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas.
Mayhem’s first full-length record has awed, inspired, and baffled metal fans the world over in its 20 year life span. While many aspects of the music are inexplicable (a friend of mine told me that he just couldn’t seem to figure out “what Attila was going for with those vocals” no matter how much he listens to it), huge swaths of the thing’s history are just flat out unsettling. For instance, DMDS remains, to this day, the only record on which a murderer plays alongside his victim. Not to mention the fact that the lyrics to Life Eternal are part of Dead’s suicide note (I’m still trying to decide if I find that inclusion sweet or creepy). But despite its struggles the little album that barely could has become an integral part of black metal history, and remains required listening for anyone remotely into extreme metal.
And while yes, I am sure, we would have all loved to hear Dead’s vocals on the album (or at least on a super-secret, previously unreleased version of it), I personally have always liked Attila’s vocal work on DMDS. Yes. It is weird. But who better to get to do vocals on songs written by a man who died in his “I Heart Transylvania” shirt than a brilliant Hungarian musician with an impressive track record (Tormentor was quite a big deal. That pesky Iron Curtain kept getting in the way, though)? The vocals are unconventional, yes, but they are creepy as hell, and considering the legacy that Attila was acting as a part of, creepy far outweighs traditional. Plus, his chanting on the title track is chill-inducing.
But vocals aren’t the only big deal with DMDS. We also must pay homage to the musical stylings of black metal’s godfather himself, Euronymous, whose intentionally-shitty-sounding tri-tone chord spawned an entire subgenre. De Mysteriis was dedicated to Euronymous,- who died before it was released- and rightfully so; while Deathcrush is absolutely fantastic, it doesn’t represent the second-wave that has, for the most part, become synonymous with the entire subgenre in the way that DMDS does.
And of course those drums. The thing that got me. Hellhammer is a god on the kit, and I am a firm believer in the suggestion that the album that became the defining line for black metal in the 90s would not have existed in the same form without Hellhammer’s musicianship. It certainly would have never seen the light of day without his determination to push through and get the damned thing done, despite the horrific hardships that plagued the band.
There are a million reasons why De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas deserves a birthday notice, even if it is a little bit late. That bass riff on Pagan Fears is simply one of them (I figured I’d throw a bass shoutout in there, even though I don’t have a very high opinion of Mr. Vikernes and Necrobutcher didn’t play on the album). However, perhaps it’s greatest accomplishment is its monumental status as a relic representing both the birth of a new era and the demise of an older one.
Well, that, and the fact that, despite two horrendously violent deaths, jail sentences, Iron Curtains, and enough disharmony to fuel the powder keg that was Mayhem in the late 80s and early 90s, we actually have an album like De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas to listen to.
-H
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