Mayhem - Deathcrush
Review: Simplistic plodding music evidencing the inability of its players, their compositional limitations being entirely finite and physical in that moment, this release builds upon the foundation of Venom and Hellhammer with similarly toneless, rhythmic, violent songs to which Mayhem add abstraction and the begins of a more literate conceptual basis. Essentially verse chorus songwriting altered with random riffs, the fundamental and noisy combinations colliding in these unfocused songs exhibit a naturalistic and barbaric atmosphere but little more.
Clumsy fusions of undefined heavy metal ideas mixed with the hardcore and industrial concepts of dissonant entropy, these songs are riffs first and as development form that simple concepts of violence. Chords trudge and crash, often dissonantly through unsteady fretting of the harmonic shape, and often erode almost linearly into conclusions, but through this unsteady presentation a necrotic sense of vengeance and morbidity fills these songs.
A true underground classic...almost immaculately meaningless yet jarringly alienated, violent, its aspirations obscure and mostly unfound like an adolescence in an empty external world which the protagonists expect to be significant. Yet somehow it reaches a semi-articulate expression of its angst in the trudging conclusions of minimized songs that after a while start to sound surprisingly like an "industrial"-ized version of Venom.