Mayhem - De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas

One of the most well known black metal albums that were ever created I presume. Released after the band disbanded because of the death of Euronymous and Varg Vikernes being the murderer, only Hellhammer remained. If you ask me this is one of the most overrated albums in all black metal, but it is still quite good.


The production is atypical for black metal with everything heard very properly. Most black metal band strives to have as bad production as possible, but that’s not present here. I find this fitting to the vocals as Attila is so diverse and makes a very unique performance. I haven’t heard anything not even similar to his vocals here except for his other projects perhaps.


Too bad everything else doesn’t need this kind of production, the guitars is not bad but they would be a lot better if the production was a little more primitive. They have a lot of atmosphere but still they lack the emotion. The bass is very audible, which is strange since Hellhammer has said he lowered the bass parts in the mix. If this statement is true I wonder what the original recording sounded like, but I am quite sure this is just a quote from the never ending chatterbox known as Hellhammer.


Speaking of Hellhammer his drum-set is not so triggered it would be on the later recordings with this band. But funny though is that on Live in Leipzig which was released some years earlier they are triggered as hell! The patterns he play is mainly some form of blast-beats along with some fairly interesting fills. Quite different from Fenriz which more or less played the same beat for a single song or at least a larger part of it. This is half good, but I also prefer more of a hypnotic feel.

Now for the vocals, as you all know Attila Csihar of the band Tormentor was recruited to sing vocals for this album. I am a great fan of his vocals to be honest; they are unique and really diverse. Too bad they almost sound unserious on some points which ruin much of the morbid feeling I guess the Mayhem dudes wanted to achieve. The first few lines of the opener "Funeral Fog" is a great example of this. Also the "clean chanting" in the middle of the title track sound almost like a joke, especially when the lyrics are just some gibberish. It is supposed to resemble Latin, but it is just what Euronymous thought was Latin. Some of you non close-minded maybe heard of Vangelis, he uses false Latin also, but his lyrics harmonizes with the music well, here it is just random phrases.


Attila’s performance do I even found unfitting to some of the lyrics, which is may be because that Dead wrote 80% of the lyrics for this album. Dead wrote some really unique lyrics for his time, they were serious sounding and lots of emotions put into them. When Attila performs some of the songs they lose some of the feeling Dead intended. Two good examples of this are "Freezing Moon" and "Buried by Time and Dust". The first is a very good song, but Attila doesn't really capture that sad/depressed feeling when he sings. Since the song is about suicide I think the vocalist shall sound like he really wants to do it, not schizophrenic as Attila do. On "Buried..." he mostly grunts in a quite odd way and fail to get into that aggressive feeling the rest of the instruments has. It is hard to blame him really, since I think the recording process of his vocals was done in quite a rush, along with other parts of the album as well.


If you want a Mayhem album to your collection if haven't got any before, I don’t suggest this album. Buy Wolf's Lair Abyss or Ordo Ad Chao instead, they are a lot better. This is as I said quite good album, but not worth as the first album to buy of Mayhem.