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).