mayhem! mayhem! mayhem!

Last night, Jayson and I stood alternately awed and terrified in the presence of black metal pioneers Mayhem. I ended the evening with broken glasses, a chipped tooth, and a deep fear of the Dark One in the hollows of my heart. Here’s how it all went down.

The evening began with profound disappointment; the bill originally was supposed to be a double-headliner, Mayhem sharing time with the equally blasphemous and equally awesome (and, periodically, significantly more awesome) Marduk. So arriving at Irving Plaza to find a photocopied sign glumly announcing “Due to circumstances beyond our control, Marduk will not be performing this evening” took a bit of the black wind out of my sails. (Cattle Decapitation, who were also announced, did not perform either. WTF, metal guys?)

At this point, my glasses and my tooth: still intact.

Openers Withered were fine, but in-betweeners Cephalic Carnage came off weirdly fratty and obnoxious. My expectations were dropping by the second.

Thank God — or rather, Beelzebub — for Mayhem. As scary as we had hoped they would be, they turned out to be somehow even scarier. At the front of the stage were a pair of fake (I think. I hope.) human heads impaled on steel pikes. To the rear, Hellhammer’s mighty and imposing drum kit. Up above, the weirdly-terrifying Mayhem logo. The noise the group generated was massive, like a giant steel dumpster full of hornets. About three songs in, I was suddenly shoved halfway across the room by a particularly ambitious mosher, my arms and limbs flailing desperately, stupidly. Fortunately, at this point, my glasses and my tooth remained intact. We spent the rest of the evening standing cautiously close to the exit.

It’s a weird thing, seeing a band whose original members either killed themselves or were killed by members or rival bands, but the current functioning iteration of Mayhem held their own just fine. Current vocalist Attilla Csihar is a nightmare come to life: he wore a pitch-black monklike hooded robe, his face a mess of ruinous corpsepaint, bladed wristbands wrapped around his arms. His movements for the night could best be described as “Satannic vogue-ing”: he’d move his arms in strange and vaguely cult-like positions (occasionally giving a very emphatic “thumbs-down” gesture, which I love as a kind of blunt signifier of evil). Then, suddenly, he’d snap them into an upside-down cross formation and scowl. As terrifying as he was, he was upstaged by a guy who appeared next to him near the end of the night for just one song. He wore a black leather face mask, and had two threatening knife-like blades extending from his gloves. He clawed the air and flung his body around on stage furiously, so much so that I was convinced that one of those blades was going to end up plunged in Attilla’s temple. His blades did not inflict the damage on my glasses or my tooth.

I’d like to be able to post the setlist, but the only song I recognized was “A Grand Declaration of War.” So the setlist would look something like:

RAAAWWWWRRR
RAAAWWWWRRR
RAAAWWWWRRR
RAAAWWWWRRR
RAAAWWWWRRR
RAAAWWWWRRR
RAAAWWWWRRR
A Grand Declaration of War
RAAAWWWWRRR
RAAAWWWWRRR
RAAAWWWWRRR

Jayson and I stumbled drunkenly from the venue, minds blown, hearts sufficiently evil, and I wandered off in search of something to eat. By this point, I had consumed a frightening amount of alcohol. So much alcohol, in fact, that I could not tell when I had successfully cleared the glass window surrounding the revolving door at the Walgreen’s. Which meant that, at around 12:30, I walked directly into said glass partition, knocking my glasses off of my face and busting one of the arms. Bravo.

Sufficiently humiliated, I decided instead to get a bagel at Dunkin Donuts. The problem is, as has been documented here, I just had a root canal. And, so, sinking my teeth into a semi-stale bagel? Yeah, awful idea.

But I can still say that I went to see Mayhem and ended up with broken glasses and a chipped tooth. So, you know, worth it.