The True Mayhem, Once the driving force and the centre of the Norwegian Black Metal scene and the centre of the birth of the 2nd wave of black Metal are touring the world to celebrate their 30th year as band, First stop on this tour lucky for us was Australia along with Swedish black metal stars Watain.
Opening act Nocturnal Graves
These guys were started out strong they hit the stage and played a very fast blackened thrash sounding set but they seemed pretty annoyed by the lack of a reaction they were getting even going as far as to call the kids in the pit posers. I can kind of understand that but you are the support band and most of the crowd hadn’t even turned up at this point. But either way these guys are good and wouldn’t mind seeing them again.
Next came Watain
Now I’m not a super Watain fan, in fact I generally avoid most newer black metal bands purely because they’re mostly just re-treading over territory that’s already been cover, so I didn’t really know what to expect.
They had their upside down crosses set up on the stage with candles all over the place and they came out dressed like some kind of black metal scarecrows. Their outfits kind of shocked me because all images I had seen of the bad they had these Leather vests on like a Biker gang.
I mean yeah they put on a pretty great live show but a lot of talk of Satan and stuff between the songs by the front man kind of feels a little played out. You’re not really breaking any new ground here but they were fun and sounded great. Crowd was super into them
Then they set up the stage and got ready for Mayhem. This was weird because Hellhammer walked out on the stage and about 8 times and kept waving to the crowd and Necrobutcher came out carrying a yellow plastic bag which is hilarious in itself as Euronymous once kicked a guy out of the black metal inner circle for carrying around his gear in a plastic bag.
The lights went down and “Silvester Anfang” came on and the band made their way onto the stage. As Necrobutcher walked out a guy next to me yelled out “WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING TO?” in his best Necrobutcher accent, it got a laughed from those around him.
Attila looked great with the noose around his neck and continually caressing the skull he was carrying. The guy does a great job live vocally I was pretty impressed actually. He really hits those low notes and does that droning almost throat singing sounds so well on top of the screeching black metal vocals,
During “Death Crush” which the crowd lost their minds for, guitarist Charles Hedger’s guitar cut out and they played the song with only one guitarist and then after that they seemed to have more technical issues which seemed to take a while for the road crew to resolve. During this time Necrobutcher really interacted with the crowd a lot making goofy faces and stuff, was weird
High lights of the set were “Pagan Fears”, “Deathcrush”, “Freezing Moon”, “Funeral Fog” and they closed with “Pure Fucking Armageddon”
Overall I was really impressed with their live show. I was a little worried that they were going to head a bit too far into spinal tap territory but they pulled the whole thing of well. For a band that majority of fans believe have basically coasted on just reputation alone since the mid 90s they surpassed all expectation I had for them and their live show.
Heres to another 30 years
