I don't need to give a history lesson on Mayhem. Any metalhead worthy of his title knows about the infamous Mayhem. The main issue about this band, and this EP, is fanboyism. Are fan boys really going to defend their favorite band due to favoritism or defend it because it's good? Well, let's hope it's favoritism, because Deathcrush sucks.



The vocals might be the most atrocious part about this album. Well, the guitars may be equally matched with that title. The vocals are a bunch of screams, so it's not really singing anyway. Had I not been looking at the lyrics I would've had no clue that words were supposed to be sung. The first time I ever heard "Chainsaw Gutsfuck", which came on randomly a few years back when I was listening to music, I didn't know words were supposed to be there. I thought it was gonna be intense, but I sat there thinking "What the hell was that shit?". Four years pass from that day and I finally found out they were trying to say something. I can only slightly bare "Pure Fucking Armageddon" since it's the only song were those god awful screams aren't used, but that doesn't make those vocals any better.



The lyrics on Deathcrush are very weak. For example, "Bleed down to the fucking core, You're going down for fucking more, Screw your slimy guts, Driving me fucking nuts", that's from "Chainsaw Gutsfuck". I don't normally point out weak lyrics, but this EP is full of them so I felt it was necessary. The overuse of "fucking" just shows how uncreative it is to have written this song. Also, rhyming "guts" with "nuts" is very kindergarten and in a black metal song a line using the phrase "Driving me fucking nuts" just doesn't fit... at all. Or how about: "A life that soon won't be"? There's more they could've done than to use that bad line. Then we have some lyrics that try to sound extreme, which is pretty much the whole album. They use adjective like slimy to describe a grave. That makes as much sense as the line "My brain is driving me insane". Some of the content in the lyrics has been done before. The whole necrophilia thing was never "hardcore" and never will be. The whole EP may have been better if Mayhem worked more on the lyrics. It seems like other bands had no issue writing more grotesque lyrics than Mayhem.



The instrumentation is pretty absolute shit. The drums are irrelevant to the whole mix. It sounds similar to that of a child having a tantrum whilst banging on anything around them with drum sticks. The guitar is, well, I have no clue. I understand the whole small-time band poor-recording quality issue, but honestly the quality wasn't all that bad yet the guitar still sounded like gargled shit. I have no clue what Euronymous was doing but it sounded like he was just hitting anything on half the tracks. The only exceptions are "Silvester Anfang", when he doesn't even play, and "(Weird) Manheim", the only good track on the album; note that "(Weird) Manheim" is an instrumental track. When Euronymous is actually hitting something like on "Chainsaw Gutsfuck" it isn't all that impressive. The stuff played is pretty repetitive too. The solos, I think there's at least one or two, are terrible from what little you hear of them. The solos sound shoved to the back of the mix along with the bass. It does little to surprise me that the bass is in the back. It's pretty common.



The song structures on Deathcrush are very simplistic. It follows a verse-chorus-verse structure almost the whole EP. The band does, unnecessarily, stop the playing for a second or two just to play something faster. They do this a lot and it's not innovative nor does it make wanna prepare my headbang. It shows when they really ran out of creativity. Some bands can make simplicity and simple structures work, but Mayhem could't do that here.



I'm not too certain whether or not there was supposed to be an atmosphere or mood on this EP. It seems too much of a complex idea for Mayhem at this point in their career.



It's a good thing Mayhem picked up the animal heads on posts, throwing raw meat into the crowd, a series of dead band mates, and other various shanannigans because there's no way this could've propelled such an infamy. Well, maybe an infamy of shit had they kept quality dumps like this churning out every year. Despite all fanboyism, which I thought would've actually been good this time, proved wrong. It seems the history of the band seems to shine more than this EP.