A Grand Departure - "Grand Declaration of War" Review (15%)
Grand Declaration of War is a massive departure from the sounds that Mayhem is best known for on the much more black metal minded De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. Here is where they make the jump from somewhat progressive yet still pretty raw black metal into full-on avant-garde metal.
If you were expecting any familiar sounds from these guys, any sort of Euronymous inspired riffs, any form of Deathcrush like vocals, you'd be expecting the wrong stuff, because this sounds absolutely nothing like the old Mayhem.
The sound on here is more electronic and experimental than before. It's also a lot less predictable and suffers from somewhat of a lack of consistency at times, although it is much better than on the follow-up turd Chimera.
For all the weird things they do on Grand Declaration of War, the Mayhem band members never really seem to follow a shared vision or even a consistent pattern through the album. There's only scant interest in actual avant-gardism here and there, and seeing as the albums coming after this are pure shit, it turns out that Antekhrist inspired experimental metal wasn't the right direction for Mayhem to go in.
Musically, Grand Declaration of War is more diverse than most would expect, yet somehow less interesting than their previous work De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas.
I suppose it all boils down to what separates a technically simple but creatively challenging album from one that's pretty dull and just experimenting without much of a clue.
The paradox of Grand Declaration of War is that it's pretty good for modern black metal, very good compared to the rest of the post-DMDS era, yet very much a letdown when compared to what Mayhem were known for in the early days of Norwegian black metal.
A Grand Departure
Another thing that makes this album Grand Declaration of War disappointing, at least compared to De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas or Deathcrush, is the production.
The fact that the guitars are so weak, limp and often kept in the background like some sort of static noise just doesn't fit the whole heavy atmosphere that Mayhem was going for. The guitars have little strength and don't do much to give the album a lot of gusto.
The only song I can say is done well in the new avant-garde electro metal style is the second track, "In the Lies Where upon You Lay", where the guitars actually have some strength, a good riff with a powerful acoustic performance that doesn't sound like a broken ceiling fan.
The direction flutters between metal and non-metal and, although I don't have a problem with non-metal material, I would have preferred a sense of coherence and conviction in the style that Mayhem once pioneered, rather than this gay sound which has abandoned all sense of black metal for the simple sake of being experimental.
Grand Declaration of War does some new and unusual things for a metal album but fails to ever be interesting or organize these various ideas together in a compelling way.
It's not bad, really, especially compared to Chimera or later Mayhem releases, but it's not good either.
Mayhem took the wrong turn with this album, starting a chain reaction that would end in the complete piece of shit album Esoteric Warfare.
At least Grand Declaration has some good riffs and some decent atmosphere, but it's nowhere near De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas.
Grand Declaration of War score: 15/100.
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