Live Review : Mayhem + Mortiis + Barshasketh @ Academy 2, Manchester on May 21st 2022

It used to be that an appearance by black metal legends Mayhem was a rare phenomenon, however, in recent years they have become less sporadic and more generous in their live appearances. Consequentially there has begun to be less of a feeling of “oh my god it's Mayhem!” and more of “Didn’t we see them last week?”. Saying all that, it is still third time lucky for this particular show. Originally scheduled for March 2020, it was pushed back into 2021 and then into this year. This trail of postpones means that there is a veritable air of expectation, even if the album they were meant to be promoting (“Daemon”) has long slipped from our collective consciousness.

The UK leg is meant to be a trilogy of Black Metal icons with British underground heroes Barshasketh propping up the bill. Well, that was the plan. The late opening of the doors and the large queue waiting to enter means that they roar onto the stage to an audience consisting of five people. And we had to learn even that morsel of information second-hand, as the late appearance of the press release means that we are stuck in the foyer for the entirety of their set. Having to be content with listening to their faint rumblings from the room above.

List located we are upstairs in time for the first of tonight’s Nordic Black Metal vanguards, Mortiis. To be frank, Mortiis is lumped in with the Black Metal crowd because he spent a year in the fledgling version of Emperor. His own output has always been variants on dark electronica, much more aligned to Nine Inch Nails and Gary Newman than his Scandinavian brethren. Tonight, he keeps the industrial tendencies back at home and we get a performance that is solely made up of tracks from his most recent album. You know those weird atmospheric synth pieces Black Metal bands use as intros? Well, this is an entire set of them. “Spirit of Rebellion” may well be a return to the sprawling dark ambience of his nineties output, but it certainly isn’t music you can bang your head to.

Whilst musically this is a million miles away from tonight’s headliner, there is still a level of reverence in the room because, well it's Mortiis. He is in his obligatory full prosthetics, which coupled with the eeriness of the music and the lack of anything that can be discerned as lighting, gives the whole endeavour a creepy and unsettling tone. Tim Van Horn sporadically joins him on stage to bash two kettle drums at what can only be described as a funeral pace. In many ways, the addition of the percussion element saves the whole thing from becoming monotonous and soporific. Mortiis is a cornerstone of Black Metal’s macabre story and he could have come on tonight and farted the recent Norwegian Eurovision entry and still have been afforded a heroes’ welcome. His decision to purely stick with unfamiliar material is brave but is vindicated by the fact that for most in attendance he has earnt the right to be self-indulgent. Even though it is repetitive and (shhh don’t tell the hordes) dull in places, it still manages to be an enrapturing performance because of the sheer magnitude and magmatism of the man.

 Mayhem has made a career out of not playing by the book. Whereas other acts have tried to cultivate Black Metal and take it into the mainstream, they have tirelessly toiled to make it as impenetrable and hostile as possible. They have not bent, and they have not bowed. Necrobutcher, Attila and Hellhammer may well be in their mid-fifties, but they are still essentially disenfranchised outcasts, eager to disrupt and offend. With other veteran Black Metal acts, you feel you are getting a sanitised version of what they once were, but with Mayhem the impression is that you are experiencing the same level of righteous indignation that you would have come across if you had witnessed them in Oslo in the early nineties.

This is a show of three distinct acts. Each is engineered to highlight and showcase the different faces and facets of Mayhem. Act one see’s the stage bathed in red light and Attila go mad in the dressing up box. This is the opaque and dense side of Mayhem and tracks such as ‘To Daimonion’ and ‘My Death’, sound as near to pure white noise as you can get and still pertain to be music. The former acts as a clarion call for the pit to materialise and a sea of bodies proceed to throw themselves at each other. What Mayhem produce is a cacophony of searing sound. Uncomfortable, disarming but utterly immersive. There is an intensity that bands half their age will never achieve. This is anger and alienation personified in unrelenting noise.

Act 2 see’s a shift towards their more ethereal and atmospheric stuff. There is still an underlying level of brutality, but it is tempered by more symphonic and choral elements. The band are now dressed in hooded robes with Attila menacingly brandishing a noose and then a skull. Black Metal was all about reclaiming the ghoulish theatrics of metal from the dress-down marys of grunge. Mayhem understands that we don’t want five boozoos in the same attire that they wore to Tesco’s, we want histrionics, we want morbid flamboyance, and they supply that in all its savage glory.  

It's all change for Act 3, which sees them play into their stripped-back punk roots. The mood lighting is replaced by sheer brightness that allows us to see everything. The costumes are also jettisoned to allow their raw beings to shine out. Black Metal may have been about putting the melodrama back into metal, but it also had a direct correlation with punk’s DIY aesthetic. It preached that anyone could pick up a guitar and that there was a beauty in undistilled distorted noise. This is Mayhem unchained, freed from the choreographed staging they are an uncompromising storm of primal energy. It is utterly relentless and utterly absorbing. There is no encore. That is not the Mayhem way. Instead, we get a final apocalyptic rendition of ‘Pure Fucking Armageddon’ and then, with wine bottles aloft, they toast the Manchester hordes. Whilst others have conformed and mellowed, Mayhem have managed to morph from irreverent rebellious teenagers into equally irreverent rebellious middle-aged men. May they never change.