Things are never simple when Mayhem is involved. This year, the legendary black metal band celebrates forty years of mischief... but when you're cursed, you're cursed. After having to cancel their American tour for health reasons, Mayhem kicked off their little European anniversary tour at Le Bataclan. There were no former members invited on stage (Mannheim or Messiah made a few appearances this year) and the Bataclan wasn't exactly sold-out (some pointed the finger at the ticket price), but the promise of two hours of concert and rarely-played tracks remained irresistible, and the evening organized by Veryshow promised to be special, despite Mayhem's relatively frequent visits to France.
VERSET ZERO
To darken the atmosphere, Verset Zero set up their altar on the Bataclan's main stage. We've had the good fortune to come across the industrial / doom / black metal project on several occasions this year, opening for bands as diverse and varied as its influences, so let's hope that little by little its universe finds its way into the darkest of hearts. Flowers and chalice, black hood and mask: as usual, the ritual begins in a mysterious atmosphere that soon collides with the heaviness of the sound. Verset Zero is guttural, monumental, theatrical and nightmarish. The music draws on a host of sonorities, at the risk of losing the uninitiated who, in a Bataclan that is gradually filling up, panic: will we have to dance?
No worries. The mood is heavy and full of restrained menace. With a sound that reminds Author & Punisher but also the 90s black metal scene or the latest work of Perturbator, Verset Zero also includes a few trap beats in its set. We can't wait to see him again in a more intimate setting, in the half-light, to take full advantage of the creativity and universe of this atypical artist and his talent for shattering boundaries and throwing all his darkness into our guts... because the Bataclan is very nice and classy, but it's a little too big and bright for that kind of mass!
MAYHEM
When Mayhem take to the stage, we quickly find that typical aroma that accompanies them, that mixture of familiarity and strangeness. After forty years, Mayhem are still something very special, and the musicians' looks are already blurring the lines: the sobriety of some contrasts with the appearance of guitarist Teloch and especially singer Attila Csihar, who go all out with make-up. And then there's the music: Mayhem's black metal is both a founding foundation and atypical and deviant, thanks to its rock'n'roll roots which give it its energy and its very particular groove. The voice of the Master of Ceremonies, a mix of grating croaks, menacing liturgies and clear-voiced passages, gives the music its putrid perfume, its authority and its madness. Attila puts on the show, a sinister, charismatic figure who single-handedly guarantees the show's unhealthy strangeness, while bassist Jørn Stubberud, aka Necrobutcher, frequently communicates with his audience. We can be amused by Attila's tendency to put his hand on the heads of the other musicians: given Mayhem's hair trend, it's unlikely that it's shampoo time (Hellhammer, hiding behind his drums, is an exception) and this ‘hug’ takes a gloomy turn air as he already seems to be coveting their skulls.
For two hours, Mayhem offer a panorama of their troubled musical and personal history. The show begins with relatively recent tracks, giving the band a chance to play MILAB or to go back twenty years and bring Chimera out of the closet, both of which are fairly rare. It's in the second half, however, that the concert reaches its climax, when the band delve back into their first album with Freezing Moon, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and Funeral Fog (Attila giving way to a recording of Dead). Circle pit, stage-viers: the atmosphere intensifies and is not that of a typical black metal concert. On a screen, the band projected photos and other archives. Familiar faces appear and, without false modesty or revisionism, Mayhem come to terms with their history and origins, which include suicide and murder, as the faces of Euronymous, Dead and Vikernes pass by, somewhere between homage and the preservation of a well-defined folklore. As tradition would have it, the concert comes full circle with the Deathcrush EP, the band's first official release and played almost in its entirety, with the intro by Conrad Schnitzler, a former member of Tangerine Dreams, providing a welcome breath of fresh air before this final infernal storm.
Mayhem didn't cheat their audience. With a generous, long and relatively exhaustive show, the Norwegian band offered us a wide panorama of their history. It was an ideal opportunity to appreciate the band's rich history... but also to see just how much the madness of their unique and sick roots continues to feed our nightmares.
