More Like Homoerotic Fartfail - "Esoteric Warfare" Review (11%)
If you were to believe the incredible and (absolutely undeserved) hype surrounding the release of Mayhem's newest fail album, Esoteric Warfare, you would be led to believe that Esoteric Warfare is the new From the Mouth of Madness. In case you somehow missed it, From the Mouth of Madness is basically the album that set the new standard for black metal back in 2013.
So apparently metal critics are now hailing Esoteric Warfare as the new From the Mouth of Madness ?
Let me make place for the only natural reaction that follows such a ludicrous statement... HAHAHAHAHAHA !!!
There is no way Esoteric Warfare even comes close to the majestic and terrifying From the Mouth of Madness, both in terms of atmosphere and in terms of musical quality.
How anyone can even think to compare this vacuous poser abomination to such a masterpiece of horror as From the Mouth of Madness is beyond comprehension. The only plausible explanation is that, avid to promote the overrated "church burners" from several decades ago (most of which are going through mid-life crisis at this point), the mainstream media had already decided long before even listening to this album that they would praise Esoteric Warfare as the next From the Mouth of Madness.
Esoteric Warfare is another acute case of "all flair, no substance" from the already greatly overrated Mayhem. What we are left with is merely a vapid media-stunt by a band that never actually knew what black metal was even about.
More Like Homoerotic Fartfail
Mayhem, the biggest posers in black metal history, are back again to further tarnish the reputation of a genre they never understood with their latest shit entitled Esoteric Warfare.
The ultra-satanists and anti-commercial church burners have of course, as all über-underground bands do, solicited the mainstream media to assist them in their marketing and promotional efforts for the album Esoteric Warfare. In a purely über-underground fashion, of course, as we could never suspect the "legends" Mayhem of being nothing more than commercial sell-outs :)
And if the ridiculousness of a situation in which a band that claims to be the only "true" underground band (they even call themselves "The True Mayhem" lol) being the biggest attention-whore when it comes to mainstream exposure doesn't at least disturb you, consider the fact that "The True Mayhem" are also the biggest attention-whores when it comes to shameless social media promotion.
Rather than spend 24 hours a day shamelessly spamming their shit album on Facebook and Twitter alongside promotional material for their latest MTV-sponsored concerts... if Mayhem had spent one tenth of that time actually working on the music of their albums, then maybe Esoteric Warfare wouldn't be the pile of overrated and boring crap that it is today.
Media-whoring and attention-seeking aside, there is no hiding the fact that the band members of Mayhem are very inept musicians.
Even if you manage to move past the annoying clicking noises (the drums), the broken ceiling fan with bad reverb (the guitars) and what I assume is the vocalist trying to take a dump after ingesting too many laxatives, you still find yourself confronted to the fact that the music on Esoteric Warfare is absolute CRAP.
The whole album sounds like a compilation of generic, plastic and lifeless tracks randomly assembled with no meaning whatsoever, and that's not even to mention the stolen riffs from various death metal songs.
There is a fine line between repetitive and boring, and it seems that Mayhem, despite pretending to be a black metal band for over thirty years, still doesn't grasp this essential difference.
Esoteric Warfare is one-dimensional generic metal. Once you've heard one track, you've heard them all. This also applies to the rest of Mayhem's discography. To make matters worse, there appears to have been no logical sequence employed in the arrangement of the songs : they go from one random riff to another random riff, with seemingly no logical sense and incongruous tempo breaks scattered throughout the songs.
Esoteric Warfare doesn't even deserve to be qualify as metal music, let alone black metal.
There's nothing "esoteric" album this album, it represents everything wrong with modern sell-out black metal : commercial, boring, insipid and overall useless.
Esoteric Warfare score: 11/100.
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