THKD’s Top 100 Metal Albums #4: Mayhem – Live in Leipzig (Century Media, 1994)

When it’s cold and when it’s dark, the freezing moon can obsess you!” – Dead

By and large, live albums are unessential affairs.  They typically consist of sonically inferior versions of a band’s “greatest hits,” with lame between song banter, distracting crowd noises, and more often than not, so many overdubs that the album is no longer “live” at all by the time it hits the record store shelves (or these days, the world wide thieves network, aka the internet).

Not so with Mayhem’s Live in Leipzig.  Recorded at a club called Eisfeller in Leipzig, East Germany on November 26th, 1990 (the day after my 11th birthday), this document captures the true essence of the infamous Norwegian black metal progenitors unlike any other recording I’ve heard from the band.  Granted, I haven’t yet been inclined to sift through the numerous bootlegs that are floating around the underground (Dawn of the Black Hearts, Vomit from Helvete, etc.) but I am extremely familiar with all of Mayhem’s studio recordings, and I can honestly say that Live in Leipzig is the truest representation of the band (and quite possibly of Norwegian/2nd wave black metal itself) ever to be pressed onto plastic (and wax).

Two things, or more accurately, two persons make this so.  Dead and Euronymous.  The presence of these two black metal iconoclasts is absolutely immense on Live in Leipzig, and although they departed this mortal coil in 1991 and 1993 respectively, that haunting presence is still epalpable wherever the album is spun (although it tends to work best in total darkness on a cold winter night), to the point that it feels like they’re speaking to you directly from beyond the grave.  Dead’s positively possessed vocals prove that his pseudonym was apt; the man sounds like he just crawled out of a rotting, dirt-covered casket, returning to the land of the living with the sole purpose of shredding his throat in the name of black metal.  Euronymous’ guitar-work dominates the mix along with the vocals, his playing some of the most unholy racket you’re ever likely to hear.  The guitar solos often sound like Euronymous is on the brink of losing control, yet somehow he harnesses all of that swarming, distorted filth into some of the darkest, most downright wicked six-string sorcery ever recorded.  One can’t help but wonder if “Chainsaw Gutsfuck” is actually a reference to the sickening guitar tones he so effortlessly conjured here.

The album’s unquestionable pinnacle is “The Freezing Moon,” a perfect black metal song if ever there was one.  It is here that everything comes together for Mayhem; the bloodcurdling vocals, the malevolent riffage and the horrific, deathly atmosphere that hung over the band like a grim reaper’s shroud intertwine in a way that other black metal bands could only hope to achieve and are still chasing after over two decades later.  This song alone proves that Mayhem should be considered legendary for their music, not for the tragedy and sensationalism that would eventually engulf the band and change it forever.  The rest of the set is equally harrowing; Mayhem’s total dedication to sonically manifesting black metal’s inherent morbidity and misanthropy borders on something resembling religious mania, such is the intensity of the performance.  I can only imagine what it was like to physically witness such wrath and ruin.

Black metal is many things. It is the musical incarnation of chaos and hatred and perverse lust.  It is the soundtrack to a lifestyle, a world view and an attitude.  It is an escape to another plane of existence, where life is a curse and only death is real.  I hear all of these things and more when I listen to Live in Leipzig.  For at least one night in 1990, Mayhem was black metal personified.