Album Review : Mayhem - Daemon (2019)
I don’t love black metal like I used to. My computer was once filled with mp3s of obscure Eastern European bands, grainy bootleg videos of live performances and logs of conversations I had with the most extreme internet weirdoes, but not anymore. It’s a genre that wears you down with theatrics and a bizarre, dogmatic sense of conformity. But I still love a handful of bands like I used to. Take Mayhem for example. Norwegian black metal pioneers have reinvented themselves over and over and pushed the boundaries of the genre throughout the years.
On their new album Daemon, the legendary outfit both channel their legacy and boldly move forward into a… somewhat new and exciting direction? That’s the thing with these guys: Mayhem never disappoint. But on Daemon, they literally don’t disappoint anybody. For better or worse.
Daemon is Mayhem’s best record since… I don’t know, Chimera? It’s more assertive and cohesive than Esoteric Warfare and feels much more like an actual Mayhem album than the otherwise solid Ordo Ad Chao. It’s built around tremolo riffs like just any black metal record, most songs eventually diverge into weird and exciting experimentation. My favorite song on Daemon is Malum, which is their most atypical. It features filthy, fuzzy mid-tempo Deathcrush-era guitar riffs and Attila Csihar’s clean, operatic vocals. Malum has one foot in the past and the other in the future.
Falsified and Hated was another pleasant surprise with its narrative-driven structure and the addition of throwback keyboards that oddly reminded me of Burzum’s Dunkelheit. That’s what I meant earlier, when I said Daemon is going into SOMEWHAT into a new direction. It’s an album that channels the past a lot. Mayhem has a rich history, but instead of recycling it like burnout rock stars, they use elements of it to create something new and that’s pretty fucking exciting if you ask me. You can accuse Mayhem of many thing, but becoming lazy isn’t one of them.
Outside of Malum and Falsified and Hated, there isn’t really a song that stands out outside of the album’s context, which is both a good and a bad thing. It’s anachronistic, but it offers a different kind of experience in the age of streaming. Other songs I liked were The Dying False King, which has this weird, disorienting bass line that doesn’t match the tempo of the song; the slow, predatory Demon Spawn that reminded me of Black Sabbath on apocalyptic drugs and the ultra-aggressive Of Worms and Ruins, which was a pleasant throwback to the days of Wolf’s Lair Abyss.
The main criticism I have towards Daemon is a pretty unfair one. But I’m really fucking sick of hearing tremolo picking, guys. I know Mayhem uses this technique as a canvas to build their song around and that it provides a baseline for the notoriously tough black metal audiences to rally around, but we’re talking of a band who reinvented their sound album after album here. It’s just frustrating to hear them settle for the middle of the road. They’re capable to transcending black metal conventions and they show it on songs like Malum. They just don’t always do it.
I know it’s a weird and unfair thing to criticize because every black metal band does it. But Teloch and Ghul are great guitarists and I just wished they expressed their personality through their instruments a little more. There’s a wild, borderline classic rock guitar solo at the end of Bad Blood, which I thought textured an otherwise straighforward and forgettable song and made it work. I don’t know which one of the two came up with it, but I would’ve loved to have more of these eccentricities on Daemon. Mayhem are great at experimenting within genre boundaries.
To be fair, Daemon is the album I wanted Mayhem to make for the last two decades. It perhaps doesn’t have the raw nihilistic power of Wolf’s Lair Abyss or the haunted atmosphere of De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, no black metal release from the last decade or so has these qualities. Mayhem’s level of excellence sometimes sets up unrealistic expectations. Daemon is solid, atmospheric and at times fiercely original. What else can we ask from a band that’s well into its third decade of existence and that’s already defined by past success? Let’s just appreciate what they give us.
7.7/10
