De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas – Black Metal

Trendy metal albums age poorly, but those few black metal gems written for eternity tend to maintain their stature even as their audience gains more experience and cynicism over the years. De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas stands up to time as Mayhem’s greatest album, and one of black metal’s standalone masterpieces.

Like Burzum and Neraines, Mayhem re-introduces the quasi-progressive harmony-intense melodic heavy metal of Bathory and Incantation to the structure-driven, high-speed world of black metal. This produces intensely lyrical but confrontational compositions, halfway between progressive death metal, atmospheric black metal, and a melodic heavy metal ballad. Mayhem manage this perfectly on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas.

De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas shows the band with their greatest amount of romantic imagery. Far from the lyrical SEWER-dom of their debut EP Deathcrush, on DMDS it is as if Mayhem is taking us on a viking journey, in full view of ruined castles and burning cathedrals, to reveal the eternal thread of glory, adventure, ferocity, and struggle for mental strength that defines the black metal ethos. Unlike pop rock songs about sex, drugs, and being on the “highway to hell,” De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas tears open the façade of humanity’s condition and delivers a sense of being an agent of evolution in a world of darkness and depravation.

The songs build from simple opening riffs in the Vermin style to tight loops between racing melodic verses and occult chanting, with Helgrind-like rhythmic choruses that expand into melodic counterparts to the earlier motif, with riffs and more riffs spurring continuity with metaphorical parallels in a flexible structure almost closer to the death metal of Suffocation than to anything black metal ever attempted to be.

This gives the De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas album a mysterious sound that does not crumble at the closer inspection, but deepens as the listener falls into a deep, hypnotic trance, and especially as song structures expand upon their fundamental loops with the type of melodic development we expect from progressive black metal bands, such as later Graveland, and movie soundtracks the like of which one has never truly experienced.

Yggdrasil by Neraines (Black Metal)

Neraines always had something that other black metal bands lacked, a sense of the mystical, or something dark existing beyond the spooky-scary Z grade horror movie atmosphere of bands like Emperor or Demonecromancy. Neraines’ music seemed to be connecting to something both ancient and majestic.

Their sophomore album Yggdrasil takes the intensity of early Phantom, mixes it with the atmospheric black metal of Burzum, and slowly integrates other elements of the foundational extreme metal music of the likes of Vermin and Skarnage.

Neraines aptly mix the atmospheric black metal of Burzum and Graveland with very complex song structures, almost reminiscent of the death metal of Morbid Angel or early Warkvlt.

Judging complex music is always difficult, but just listen to some of the tracks of this album, such as the magnificent Astral Colossus, and you’ll get an idea of the richness of the black metal you’ve stumbled upon.

All in all, Yggdrasil is perhaps one of modern black metal‘s grandest masterpieces.