Deathcrush

I was there, back in the early 90s', when the whole black metal thing exploded. Back in those days my friends and I were all long haired teenagers who were mainly into grindcore and death metal. Around '92/'93 everybody and their grandma started to talk about those crazy satanic metal bands outta norway. Half of my friends suddenly turned into it. I gave it a try for a year or so but it wasn't my thing. Songs were too long, the whole corpse painting thing was (and still is) ridiculous and the right wing attitude of most of those bands was a big no no for me. I was mainly into grindcore and those clowns dressed in black were just a bunch of nazi posers to my young and idealistic eyes. Flash forward to 20 years later and I've learned to enjoy a band even if I don't agree with its attitude. To make a long story short, if I weren't an idealist moron back in the day, now I could own at least the second press of Mayhem "deathcrush" lp on Death Like Silence Productions. I still remember one of my friend buying it at Stiv Valli's (of TVOR fame) New Zabrinskie Point record shop around '93. I still don't like most of the output of that scene. There's only two records out of that scene worth my money: Mayhem "Deathcrush" and Burzum mini lp"Aske".

Last summer I went to visit Norway with my girlfriend. While in Oslo, I visited this great record shop called Tiger Records. Nice place but, like everything in Norway, it was bloody expansive. I didn't even ask if they had OG X-Port Plater records since it would have meant that my holiday was prematurely over in the right moment they would have pulled off an OG Svart Framtid or Bannlyst ep. So I started looking for the recent repress on Back On Black of the two aforementioned black metal classics. Of course I could get them via mailorder but buying them in norway would have been something "special". Plus, as dumb as it sounds, I wanted to take a picture holding them in front of the legendary Fantoft stave church. But at 25€ each I passed. I was pretty sure to score them for way cheaper on the web. Recently I've ended up ordering a copy of "Deathcrush" from amazon and guess what? It costed me exactly 25€...

For such a classic, they did things in the right way at Back On Black HQ: fat gatefold cover, 180 gr. vinyl and a perfect reproduction of the original. I'd prefer to own it on black wax but since it took me 20 years to finally own a copy, I won't complain. This record is perfect under every point of view. The awesome front cover. That weird drum intro. The guitar sound. From the opening riff of "deathcrush" to the blast beats of "pure fucking armageddon", this is a genre defining record under every point of view. How funny is the "no fun, no core, no mosh, no trend" anti-Scott Burns thing? If I remember well, "Aske" had something similar but with Anton La Vey...