Review Summary: Mayhem is running out of steam folks.
Mayhem is a band that really needs no introduction. With a rich history dating back over 40 years at this point, these guys are black metal royalty and a band that is seminal in creating the signature black metal sound that we all know and love today. Despite numerous hang-ups like murder, church burning, suicide and many different lineup changes, the core of Mayhem has always kept going strong. The real question is, how do the guys really sound after all of these years and is
Liturgy of Death a welcome addition to their legendary discography? Well, overall the answer is yes, but it's not all sunshine and roses. The guys are starting to show a few signs of running out of steam, to be quite honest, and while there are still plenty of bangers to be found, a bit of unoriginality is starting to creep in.
The opener, ‘Ephemeral Eternity’, is a dissonant black metal banger that features odd time-signatures and some creepy crooning courtesy of Garm of Ulver fame. Unfortunately, the rest of the album blends together too much for my personal liking. Yeah, there are some cool riffs here and there, but it's too few and far between. The production is also not the greatest and is a bit too clean, especially for Mayhem standards. It's hard to pick out highlights because, sadly, a lot of the album just sounds exactly the same track after track. Atilla is a beast, like always, but even his maniacal vocal performance isn't enough to really set the album apart from many of its counterparts in today's black metal scene.
Mayhem is a band that is pretty much living off of their insane reputation at this point, and over 40 years into their career, can you really blame them? It's obvious that they're still having fun making music and that should count for something. Most of the band are in their late 50s/early 60s so you would have to figure that they would run out of steam by this point. Don't get me wrong,
Liturgy of Death is still a decent slab of black metal, but for a band that has released so many classic albums full of banger riffs, hellish drum performances and demonic vocals, this album just doesn't measure up. As I mentioned, the opening track featuring Garm shows off some cool experimentation, but they fail to follow that up by continuing in that vein. They more-or-less fall into the trap that a lot of modern black metal bands fall into: sterile production and stale riffs. That isn't a recipe for success, especially for a band like Mayhem.
