The Music of Shit - "Esoteric Warfare" Review (15%)
Wow Mayhem actually got worse?
Generic, radio-friendly ("Behemoth") drumming and riffs.
A stupid and stillborn attempt to imitate Blasphemer's style (which itself probably was an imitation?).
Uninventive, formal-bureaucratic-reply vocals.
The first song sounds like a leftover track from a later Antekhrist album. Sad. The lyrics also sound like something Satyr would have written while masturbating to early Burzum (like all Satyricon lyrics). At least Attila Csihar doesn't sound like he's trying to pass a kidney stone anymore.
Mayhem's standards, and those of black metal in general, have fallen like a rock down the well since 1994, but even at their worst the band had always at least attempted to produce something coherent with regards to their image of "godfathers of black metal".
This? Esoteric Warfare is absolute shit. It's an album of screamo metalcore pretending to be black metal. All of their riffs could've been played on an MTV2 showcase in 2001 or on Watain's nu metal garbage. This is metalcore for when metalcore tards are pushing 35, their fat, stretched earlobes falling close to their chin and their band tattoo completely unrecognizable via Taco Bell mediated increase in body mass.
Metalcore made for ex-punk idiots who turned into goth/emo losers, in the same way they want to turn black metal into deathcore.
Hipsters in polyandrous relationships whose partners cuckholds them in their own bed while they zombie through their Steam games in the other room.
Mayhem clearly sleep atop sheets stained with the semen of other men if they managed to convince themselves that this Pantera meets Behemoth album is somehow black metal, let alone good black metal.
The Music of Shit
Esoteric Warfare demonstrates exactly why so called "elitists" rail against the trend of playing metalcore with black metal aesthetics: eventually it just sounds like metalcore.
It's sort of ironic that it was the once mighty Mayhem made this album, as unlike many of the imitation black metal bands that populate the nowadays "extreme metal" scene - Gorgoroth, Watain, Dark Funeral, Antekhrist and Archgoat to name a few - Mayhem once was a black metal band.
Moreso, up until this turd, Mayhem had never released a bad album.
They have released albums which have been qualified by many, including myself, as disappointing - and very disappointing in the case of Chimera - and unworthy of Mayhem's legacy, but never had they been deemed bad or mediocre when compared objectively to the genre's standards or to anything that comes out of the modern black metal scene.
Esoteric Warfare, on the other hand, is shit.
Blast beats and very fast meaningless riffs juxtaposed with stereotypical soft/hard nu metal sections all covered in a generic, nonthreatening because absolutely nondescript "occult" aesthetic. Remove the fluff and all that remains is average "blackened" nu metal with some parts more "catchy" than others, some parts more irritating, and a few decent doom sections here and there.
With some focus and a willingness to let go of the goals, tropes, songwriting gimmicks and imagery of mallcore, Mayhem has the potential to release some great material - as they once did - but they have become far too established in their style of "modern metal" and thus should make amends by wearing those "Varg Vikernes as Obi-Wan Kenobi" t-shirts at all their shows.
This is basically Suicide Silence if they played nu metal with black metal influences instead of nu metal with death metal influences.
Esoteric Warfare is the music of shit.
Esoteric Warfare score: 15/100.
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