Mayhem - Chimera
Chimera is an album that really shows the weaknesses of a one-guitar band. The sound on this album is good, yet the guitar seems to be a little weak. It just doesn’t have a full enough sound to get out of the shadow of the percussion section. The riffs are audible for the most part, but this album really suffers when the speed is high, which is a lot of the time. When Mayhem slows things down, they are generally at their best. The riffs are more memorable, have a bit of an atmosphere and don’t sound like a wall of white-noise buried somewhere between the snare and the bass drums. When the speed kicks up, the riffs lose their clarity and it gets a bit tough to hear just what Blasphemer is playing, particularly when Hellhammer decides to ride the snare and blast away. I was a bit leery about getting this album as I really didn’t like the way Mayhem had decided to progress with Grand Declaration of War, but Chimera is much more akin to Wolfs Lair Abyss in terms of sound. Personally, while I thought that Chimera was an okay album, I really, really prefer De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas to anything the newer version of Mayhem has released since.
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