At the truest heart of metal lies a voice embodied, somewhat childishly, somewhat ineptly, but no less clearly and latent with potential, by Mayhem’s Deathcrush. The re-inversion of all values that metal enacts starts with the embracing of what modernity would see as its sickness unto death. The despair and sin of sickness unto death become vital active elements in the morbid minds of those who would vanquish dogmatic preconceptions in the Sky God Religions and their secular humanist counterparts. Being, in essence a way of connecting back to itself, the ideological blockages set up by this dead-end society had to be faced head on. Herein lies the relevance and meaning of the present album. Despair is converted into pure energy, the rules disavowed, the road of sin is tread fanatically as a method of purification —a negative unity of evil towards the beyond, away from human-ness in its modern form, away from mundanity. For the burgeoning underground, as seen from Mayhem’s perspective, primacy would placed on being and its dark discovery of self, against the presumption of knowing, and the oppressive, futile impositions from above. All knowing, all value of music, would come from this ‘being’, from a dark exploration of the soul possessed by a cosmic force of destruction.
14 CommentsTags: Bathory, Black Metal, deathcrush, Discipline and Punishment, God and the State, Hardcore, hellhammer, Karl Marx, Mao, mayhem, Socialism Utopian and Scientific, Stalinism
