HYLI Vol. I - Mayhem and MC5
This experiment kicks off with two live albums: One trve Norwegian black-metal and one proto-punk album recorded in the Motor City.
Welcome.
Hi. Hello. Thank you for signing up to receive this electronic mail newsletter. I hope you like music because for the foreseeable future Andy and Patrick are going to be sending you, reader, emails Talkin’ Bout Music. Andy is a lifelong metalhead and listens to pretty wacky and obscure black metal, death metal, slam, beatdown, etc. stuff that I, Patrick, a normal person with a wife and a mortgage, do not listen to. Every week he is going to pick an album from the darkest depths of the internet with the goal of committing aural torture on his friend, me, and I will listen to said album and provide some short feedback on it. I, a good friend, will send him one album he has never heard but is, ostensibly, Normal Music, and he will do the same. We Hope You Like It.
Mayhem - Live in Leipzig
Andy: This is pretty much the only Mayhem album I enjoy. It is one of the only official releases with Dead on vocals, which is the main reason I return to it. If you’re not familiar with the history of early Mayhem look it up. It is wild. Pretty fantastic black metal in a painfully raw setting. Hope you like it.
Pat: This album was A Lot but I really enjoyed it. It seems like everyone involved in the making of this live album is a true scum of the Earth, miserable kind of person, but it makes for some good head-banging Rock and Roll. That is probably what I enjoyed most about the album. While there are a lot of blast beat noise portions, every few minutes they’ll sink into a groove of some Black Sabbath meets Nirvana type grunge + rock and roll type riffs and the combination of that stuff with the traditional OG black metal kind of rules.
The production and placement of the vocals in the mix might be bothersome to some but if it is to you, consider growing up and/or having fun for once. I really enjoyed the oddity of it and, to be honest, it isn’t the worst mixing I’ve ever heard off a live album. I don’t have much of any familiarity with Mayhem’s studio work, but Live in Leipzig made me want to check it out. It also made me check out their Wikipedia page. What a bunch of fuckos. Just dorks being nazis and weirdos. I appreciate the riffs and am glad I have never met anyone as seemingly shitty as everyone involved with this band. Shoutout to, ahem, Hellhammer, who really did a good job beating the hell outta the drums.
MC5 - Kick Out The Jams
Pat: The MC5 are considered to be one of the forefathers of punk, and there are few more punk things I can think of than the first music you’re putting out into the world as a band being a live album full of new songs that the world has never heard. It worked too. The album debuted at #30 on the Billboard 200. I simply cannot imagine any new band dropping a live album as their first release and cracking the top 100 at all. The album rules, the guitar sounds like it’s ripping out of your speaker, which is how guitars should always sound. Kick out the jams, motherfuckers. Hope you like it.
Andy: This album kinda rips? Starting out your second intro with “kick out the jams motherfuckers!” is definitely punk. Hiring the guy who was not “conventionally attractive and rather paunchy by traditional frontman standards” (Wikipedia’s words, not mine) as your vocalist is definitely punk. Dropping a live album as your first record is definitely punk. But is this record punk? Or is it rock and roll? I don’t know if I know the difference? I don’t think it matters?
A ton of raw and wild energy on this record. There are some very, very fun riffs in here. “Kick Out The Jams” is the stand-out track for me (song slaps), followed by “Motor City Is Burning.” The dual guitarists go at it during the end of “Rocket Reducer.” “Starship” is a wild ride. Does this album have any bad songs? I don’t think so. Maybe “I Want You Right Now” loses me a little but not by much. As fun as the songs were, I particularly enjoyed the in-between bits of guitar noodling and talking to the crowd - moments that really make a live record worthwhile. This is a very fast 40 minutes.
For a live record, this sounds fantastic but I really only have experience with black/death metal live albums that do not have good track records. I enjoyed this. I’ll probably throw “Kick Out The Jams” on a couple of playlists. Shoutout to not stabbing each other like some other bands.