Noise Pollution #6: What do Chelsea Wolfe and Mayhem Have in Common?

I had somewhat of a “come to Jesus” moment last year when I realized that I was old enough that I needed someone to look inside my asshole for reasons other than a splendid time for us both and I started pissing out rocks because my caffeine consumption was what I used to help take away my cigarette consumption. That moment was my coming to grips with aging and the side effects of the process, like the fun below-the-belt topics outlined so eloquently above, but also I started digging into records from my youth a bit. Ground zero for that interest was when Emperor did their livestream performance, which wouldn’t really have caught my attention too much except that they were planning to do a bit from each era of the band and that for the early shit they would be joined by Mortiis and Faust.

I swear to god this eventually catches up with this piece’s title, just bear with me.

My initial exposure to black metal in the early-mid 1990s was mostly Norwegian (Darkthrone, Emperor, Enslaved, and Mayhem). All of their old records conjure up a lot of feelings and memories for me and I’m now at that strange precipice of aging where that sort of shit catches up to me, so the idea of Emperor doing this was more of a nice nostalgic trip, rather than the irritant I’ve seen some others around my age express. Because of this, a record like “Henhouse Recordings” then turned into a record I wanted to check out instead of something that passed through my radar without much more than a tiny blip. I became more open to what I would (and still do, though I’m rather ambivalent) have deemed a “cash grab” years prior. So later in the year when Mayhem announced an EP with a bunch of punk covers I didn’t roll my eyes as much as when Slayer did the same thing twenty years prior. I just figured that it was that time in the band’s lifespan, especially with the lack of touring opportunities, and it would be another release of theirs that wouldn’t register. To make a long story a tad shorter, you can go to my year end list to see how my feelings about this EP ended up. The point isn’t that Mayhem’s versions of Ramones and Dead Kennedys songs were fucking fantastic, but that they also covered Rudimentary Peni. Peni were definitely the most “obscure” (if you can call them that) of the bands they covered, but rather than going with one of the more well-known songs Mayhem went for a song off one of Peni’s later records Echoes of Anguish‘s “Only Death”.

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It’s a fine cover, and like the other covers on the EP they play it very close to the original and do an admirable job of it, but for some reason it’s my least favorite of the covers they chose, which is odd since Rudimentary Peni is probably within my top few favorite bands. I think I wanted something more out there which, considering I would have never imagined Mayhem covering Rudimentary Peni to begin with, in hindsight, seems greedy. It’s like wanting forever after just one night of passionate copulation. You’re ruining the moment by creating this impossible vision of what you desire.

Or are you?

Rewind about a decade (minus a year) or so to a mall in south New Jersey where I’m behind the counter of an indie record store. Chelsea Wolfe is a name that’s been spoken a lot by my customers who tend to buy interesting shit and not annoy me with stories of their musical youth (sort of like I just did for a few hundred words, oops) but I hadn’t given her a listen, probably because I’m generally contrarian and was probably busy in some genre rabbit hole I’ve since abandoned. We would use a distributor from California who I’d grown to despise because they would just send boxes of whatever the fuck they felt like and my boss would just pay for it, so in that days boxes of bullshit rockabilly and oddities that no one, not even the fucking bands themselves, cared about. I pulled out a few copies of Wolfe’s “Prayer for the Unborn” which, like any of the other Latitude titles that crossed through our doors, had really intricate packaging which caught my eye, so I put one aside to check out later. By the end of my shift all of our copies had sold, so I decided on a blind buy because, fuck it, if I didn’t care for it I was sure I could sell it later.

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I put it on as I was closing up shop and was instantly mesmerized by it. The guitar was so saturated in reverb that it didn’t sound like an earthly instrument. This was a record like nothing I’d ever listened to before, save one rather obscure Cold Meat Industry band, Consono, and their track “Beyond the Ocean,” which almost 30 years after I first heard it remains uniquely haunting and I’d never found something that matched that atmosphere, at least until Prayer for the Unborn.

I’m sure a few people will tell me whatever shit they think is similar or that I wasn’t looking/listening hard enough but you can save your time. I don’t really care.

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It was only a bit later that I realized the song titles were familiar, very familiar. Wolfe had released an EP of Rudimentary Peni covers but had deconstructed them to a point of making them unrecognizable, and these were deep cuts from across Cacophony up until No More Pain–not the records you see patches for at any crust show. This was obviously a record done out of love and showed an immense creativity and curiosity that not a lot of musicians demonstrate when covering another’s work. This was a record that was going to stick with me for a long time, which is obvious since I’m writing about the fucking thing almost a decade later.

So Mayhem and Chelsea Wolfe represent two sides of the same coin, both unexpectedly covering an excellent band, with one playing it very close to the original while the other takes it into an unrecognizable direction. Both are enjoyable for different reasons and make an excellent case study for how an influence can become so varied and personal. I haven’t kept up with Wolfe since the Abyss record, mostly because I took a few years off from really seeking out new music, but I’m pretty sure everything turned out ok for her, and Mayhem… I hadn’t picked up anything new from them since Grand Declaration of War. Just this one-sided conversation alone will cause me to spend the next few hours diving into what I’ve missed by both artists. That’s the power of a strong public inner monolog, as well as the unifying force that is Rudimentary Peni, which we’re going to talk about in greater detail when I see you again in two weeks.

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