Few underground observers would dispute that Mayhem’s 1994 debut, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, remains the single most important album in the Norwegian black metal saga. This furious live document of the band’s first ever front-to-end performance of it, recorded in Norrköping, Sweden, at the end of 2015, is clearly not meant to usurp the source material, but it does hammer home exactly how powerful, disturbing and otherworldly songs such as Freezing Moon and Life Eternal really are.
The absence of Mayhem founder and guitarist Euronymous aside (he was murdered by Burzum’s Varg Vikernes, who also played bass on De Mysteriis, in a twist of grim symmetry), this gets thrillingly close to the original album’s bleak and feral spirit, albeit with a bigger, beefier and more ferociously precise sound that reveals plenty of fresh nuance amid the swirling riffs, merciless speed and Hungarian vocalist Attila Csihar’s inhuman gargling and miasmic chants.
More a diehard-friendly reaffirmation of potency than a plea for renewed recognition, this is convincing evidence that the grim magic of the mid-90s has faded not one corpse-painted jot.
