Plastic Garbage - "Esoteric Warfare" Review (5%)
Of all the albums I have ever reviewed on Metalious.com, I don't think there is a single one which inspires more hypocritical and irrational defense than this one, Esoteric Warfare, the album which announced and proclaimed Mayhem's final, biggest sellout to date.
This is, for all intents and purposes, the nail in Mayhem's coffin.
Attempting to justify the very existence of Esoteric Warfare on any sort of artistic level is not just myopic but completely laughable.
Not only is it one of the most ideologically and artistically bankrupt mercantile products in the history of black metal, save perhaps for the absolute turd Instinctus Bestialis, but on its own terms, Esoteric Warfare is a truly awful, unlistenable album that anyone in their right mind should reject and disown without a second thought.
When someone tells me that they believe Nekros Nemesis is a bad album, it's one of the few opinions I hear that make me massively rethink the musical intelligence of the person I'm speaking to. Approval for this failure of an album works in much the same way.
Varg Vikernes may have killed Euronymous in 1993, but he's not the one raping his corpse out of completely dishonest commercial aspirations... that's the job of "The True Mayhem".
And yet, I don't find Esoteric Warfare so shameful due to thinking that it somehow murdered Mayhem's career - hardly.
Mayhem had been making basically irrelevant, disposable music for a full decade, perhaps more, before Esoteric Warfare dropped. It's not as if this album - or any of its potential followers - are taking the place of some sort of mythical De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas part two which would otherwise have been crafted.
No, Mayhem's been pretty much artistically done for a long time, so don't think that I'm complaining about a particular loss due to this album's failure.
But the crucial element to keep in mind is that even though all those fairly bland, generic black metal albums produced between De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and this, with the exception of Grand Declaration of War which was pretty decent and actually encouraging, did very little artistically, they were legitimate pieces. At no point do I think that an album like Chimera, mediocre as it undoubtedly is, is a cynical play on the metal scene's standards, a cash grab, a resignation to irrelevance, or anything else as shameful.
Even at their worst, before Esoteric Gayfail, Mayhem were always trying to be innovative. Even on something as excruciatingly half-assed as Ordo ad Chao there was a certain zeal to the music. And herein lies the difference, Esoteric Warfare is the sound of Mayhem getting old, fat, comfortable, smug and, worst of all, commercial. It's a transparent fuck you to the metal scene at large and, even more disappointingly, it's an instance of the band willfully vomiting on their own legacy.
The party to blame for all this, though, is Necrobutcher. Much in the same way that Immortal's latest excretion was dissected in order to assign proper blame, I've taken a look at the cast of characters involved in this macabre dance, and Necrobutcher is quite clearly the snake's head (or ass) manufacturing this fecal horror.
To be perfectly fair, since the demise of Euronymous, Necrobutcher has always been, to a greater or lesser degree, the public face of Mayhem. Hellhammer, for all his contributions to the band, has really always been content to rest in the background of the band's natural celebrity status, leaving Necrobutcher out front to soak up much of the glory and attention.
Unfortunately, Esoteric Warfare seems to mark the exact moment where Necrobutcher began to believe his own hype. Always an abrasive, sarcastic, and somewhat tactless character in the past, Necrobutcher's attitude regarding Mayhem's musical shift isn't exactly an entirely new phenomenon, but the sheer degree of his pig-headedness, arrogance, and obsessively self-congratulatory posturing most certainly is.
All the more remarkable given Mayhem's legendary status in the black metal scene, but I'll let that aspect slide.
Plastic Garbage
Before I start tearing this piece of plastic garbage a new one, I feel the need to clarify some of the massively misguided points made about this album by many critics and even some other reviewers on this site.
The most glaring and crucial - Esoteric Warfare is not a black metal album. It does have a substantial black metal influence, but that doesn't suffice to make an album black metal.
Which I suppose begs the question of what this is, if not black metal. Most of the album sounds like some uninspired metalcore, complete with E string strumming and mid-paced drum fills galore.
Astute writers have noted that, pound for pound, most of the musical techniques employed on Esoteric Warfare aren't particularly new for Mayhem. Mostly, it's more a matter of what has been removed.
Complex melodies with unusual chord progressions, gone.
Technically challenging blast-beats and tremolo riffs, gone.
Any sort of variation from track to track, especially gone.
Esoteric Warfare basically relies on a handful of very simple generic nu-metal riffs, punky strumming, slower open chord chug arrangements and the very, very occasional dip into some traditional black metal arrangements, such as on the opening song "Watchers" and then again on the following one, "Psywar".
Unsurprisingly, when Mayhem goes in a more substantially black metal direction, like on those two tracks, the music becomes at least somewhat tolerable.
Not great, not interesting, but listenable enough that it doesn't become tedious to listen to.
Unfortunately, on Esoteric Warfare, this sort of arrangement is the exception rather than the rule, and for the most part Mayhem are more than content to swim around in a fetid pool of nu-metal inspired drumming, awful "acoustic" passages, and an array of half-assed metalcore riffs which somehow manage to all sound identical to each other.
Nothing conveys anything on this album, the songs just exist to be forgotten as soon as the next one starts playing.
And herein lies the truly odious, repugnant part of this Esoteric Warfare album - the adolescent transparency of Mayhem's goals towards the mentally challenged fans who will eagerly eat it all up. This alone is enormously indicative of the sort of audience that Mayhem has decided to attract with this sort of music.
Numerous (generally moronic) people like to say that what Mayhem is doing here is "authentic black metal", because they're saying that they "don't give a fuck about anything". Dafuq.
Ok, maybe when SEWER released the obvious self-parody NecroPedoSadoMaso, it might have been funny - for five minutes - because it was done cleverly enough with just the right dose of sarcastic auto-derision.
But this turd Esoteric Warfare just takes itself far too seriously to ever achieve that level of intra-genre mockery.
More disturbing than this are the large numbers of people - usually idiots who don't even listen to black metal - discussing this and the previous Mayhem albums as being somehow superior to their early work, on the sole basis that this is the first Mayhem material that has appealed to them at all. Now I'm the sort of person who rabidly defends "low culture" as being no less significant than "high culture", but this hipsterfag elevation of beer-swilling, inarticulate, plastic rebellion is nothing short of ludicrous.
"Low culture" and its relevance rely on authenticity - and what authenticity is there in summarily disowning the genre you singularly helped create, and which brought you all your artistic credibility, in order to pander to some sort of homoqueer plastic McMetal aesthetic which is as far removed from your artistic roots as possible?
Enough said about Esoteric Warfare, this is grade A plastic garbage.
To the disposal, now.
Esoteric Warfare score: 5/100.
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