European Legions

This is a compilation album, with tracks 1-7 recorded live and tracks 8-12 being pre-production tracks from “Grand Declaration of War”.

The first thing that stuck out to me on this release was Maniac’s vocals. Throughout all my years of being a Mayhem fan I’ve always just dismissed him as an inferior vocalist compared to both Attila and Dead. However there is something about his performance on this release that sticks out as intriguing to me. The introduction of spoken word passages are a nice change of pace and his shrieks on Deathcrush and GDoW material fit will with the accompanying music. His performance on “Freezing Moon” is absolutely dreadful though, you can tell he has no idea how to perform that song and mumbles incoherent shrieks the entire way though it.

Moving onto the guitar and bass, Blasphemer and Necrobutcher both play fairly tight with not too many faults or playing errors. Again though, during “Freezing Moon” Blasphemer rushes to fast into it and destroys what ever atmosphere was left over after Maniac opened his mouth. His performance on GDoW material is more enjoyable, obviously more suiting to his playing style.

Next we have Hellhammer’s performance on drums. Although he is an extremely talented drummer, his reliance on triggers is a real set back. The constant “click click click” underneath each song proves a little annoying. However his remaining drum work is performed mostly without flaw.

I think this release would have been much better if they had included more GDoW material in the first live half. As it’s both Maniac and Blasphemer’s strong points, leading to a stronger and more enjoyable live performance. All in all not a bad release, of course it’s unnecessary given that all these tracks have been released before and the 87’-94’ material has been played to death. I’d recommend it to a newer Mayhem fan who is after a broadish variety of songs as an introduction to the band.

Among Mayhem's many releases between 1998 and 2001 that can be labelled as "essentially worthless," this live album definitely qualifies as one of the shittier ones. If you're looking to capture the pure energetic essence of the band, pick up 99's Mediolanum Capta Est instead. European Legions suffers from all the symptoms that could possibly make a live CD terrible: bad sound, a rough performance, a short set, and a boring crowd.

It's easy to see just from listening to the recording that this whole performance was ripped from the mixing board, not the stage. Hellhammer's triggered drums stick out like a sore thumb, and as you would expect, drown out the rest of the band with their sterility. The snare drum doesn't sound bad at all, but the bass and toms sound terrible, maintaining that same goddamned "click" that we've heard a million times before. Blasphemer's guitar tone is grating and digitally overdone, and Maniac's vocals, unfortunately for us, come out to the front of the sound mix. As far as Hellhammer's performance goes, not much can be said; it's an "instant gratification" scenario, where you'll shit yourself at his technical proficiency and speed, only to later be annoyed at his so-called "technical flair," which is just adding seemingly random fills to the song or playing the song at an absurd pace to the point where the whole band sounds poor.

The rest of the band aren't on top of things either; Maniac sounds dismal and uninspired, Blasphemer misses a handful of notes and fucks up solos, and Necrobutcher doesn't do much of anything. To add onto a terrible performance, Mayhem only play an 8-song set, which will leave most listeners feeling empty; and the crowd during this performance as almost as dead as the band themselves. You hear a few drunken yells of "DEATHCRUSH!" and requests for old material, and some scattered chanting of the band's name. Otherwise, you would think that this crowd fucking hates the band.

However, some good aspects do come along. Firstly, the band finish their performance. Yay! But seriously, the pre-production tracks from the then-forthcoming album Grand Declaration of War are pretty cool. Though the production is significantly lower in standard than that of the actual album release, it's interesting to see how differently things were done before the songs were finalized. Some drum parts were done differently, Maniac's patterns and performance were in the evolutionary stages, and Blasphemer tends to layer the guitars in different manners. It's an intriguing look as to how the band evolved from the course of the demo tracks to the recording of the actual album.

If you want to hear the true fury of Mayhem in a live setting, pick up the aforementioned Mediolanum Capta Est, or Live in Leipzig. Avoid this album unless you're seeking it for collection purposes, and download the pre-production tracks.

As much as I am a Mayhem fan, I have to agree with previous contributors that endless repetition of old stand-bys doesn’t exactly smack of artistic integrity. Let’s face it, Mayhem are as slow as a wet week (or year, or …) at releasing new material and they and their label are fairly sure that hungry fans will lunge at yet another version of “Freezing Moon” to fill the gap until the next studio album. I have eight versions of “Freezing Moon” (go on, laugh!) – nine, if you count the Vader cover on the tribute album – and I know there are more out there.

Having said that, this album is not as bad as you might think. I have written elsewhere that it’s probably the best single-album intro to the band you can get, offering a mix of the better songs from both old and new Mayhem. Regarding the studio work of the reformed Mayhem, I have to say that it is generally excellent and a worthy successor to the old "DMDS" classics. I know how much flak is fired at “Grand Declaration of War” by devotees of Dead and Euronymous, but I won’t hear a word of it. In fact, if pressed to pick all-time favourite Mayhem tracks I’d have to include “To Daimonion” and “Crystalized Pain in Deconstruction” alongside “Deathcrush”, “Freezing Moon” and “From the Dark Past”.

The live cuts here are satisfactory, but less than stellar. “Mediolanum Capta Est” is the album to get if you want intense “new Mayhem” live energy. However it’s the stripped back rehearsal versions of key tracks from “GDOW” presented here that prove this disc’s highlight. I have to say I prefer these pre-production efforts, if only slightly, to the official versions. “To Daimonion” and “Crystalized Pain in Deconstruction”, in particular, have a very tight, live feel about them and impress anyone I’ve played them to.

I was fortunate to pick this disc up second-hand quite cheaply. To my delight, having removed the clip case, I saw the slick was signed by Maniac. The shop knew neither band nor vocalist. My luck.

This is exactly that. There was no need to release not one, but TWO live albums of the same material. Ok, so they substituted Freezing Moon for Necrolust on U.S. Legions, but still, it's the same damn thing. Season of Mist is basically portraying themselves as greedy, money hungry slobs, which they probably are anyway. Sure the musicianship is great, but we have heard these songs way too many times before live, no matter how great they truly are. Sure, I love Freezing Moon just as much as the next guy, but do we need to hear it live yet again from the same lineup as Mediolanum Capta Est, where they played these songs previously. Sure there are two songs from GDOW played live, but that's it. They could have atleast included more of those songs, as they are more fresh than Freezing Moon or Carnage. The pre-production tracks are good, but nothing special. They just don't have the overproduced feeling to them and the techno.

Live in Marsille is a much better purchase, as it has like 17 songs. This has a measly 7 live songs and like 5 pre-production tracks, which is downright atrocious. When will Mayhem get off their asses and finish Chimera? And you know what? When they release that and tour to support it, I bet you anything they will release atleast 5 live albums, all only having maybe 2-3 songs max on them from Chimera and the rest from De Mysteriis and Wolf's Lair Abyss. Shit, I bet Season of Mist won't make any money anyway off these.

These are the first two words that come into my mind whenever I think about this release. Let me explain you why: after something like 2 years after the previous live release (Mediolanum Capta Est) and just one more studio album, Mayhem (or better, Season Of Mist) fire out ANOTHER live release... which makes 3 official live albums for this band, not counting God knows how many bootlegs. This would be enough to make "European Legions" useless, but sadly the nonsense goes on.

First, the tracklist includes only 7 live tracks. Considering that "Live In Leipzig" and "Mediolanum Capta Est" offered 9 and 11 respectively (hell, even bootlegs like "The Return" have a more lengthy tracklist) suspects are bound to rise immediately. This could be justified if the purpose of this release was to display the band playing the new material live, which they actually did on the tour. But there's something wrong, as only 2 songs ("To Daimonion" and "View From Nihil") come from "Grand Declaration Of War". The rest... "Fall Of Seraphs", "Carnage", "Freezing Moon"... wow, something we've never head before! Great songs, no doubt about it, but what's the need to issue them again when we could hear them played by the same line-up on "Mediolanum Capta Est"?
There is, however, something more: 5 songs from "Grand Declaration Of War" in pre-production version. Some might like them more than the overproduced album renditions, but still it's not enough to justify this release. And don't let the cool slipcase fool you - the actual cover of the album is the same dead dove laying in barbed wire we saw since the GDOW promos went out.

I'm giving this release a 50 because of the great musicianship displayed by the band on stage and the excellent quality of the live sound. It could have been a great complete live album... another waste of potential.
To make it EVEN MORE absurd, Season Of Mist decided to issue another version of this release for the American Market, labelled "U.S. Legions", the only difference being the absence of the slipcase and the inclusion of "Necrolust" (another song we've never heard about) in the live set... obviously there's a price to pay to have one more song, so they took "Freezing Moon" out of the tracklist.

...oh, I almost forgot the finishing touch: finally, in 2002, Season Of Mist released a full live cd, named "Live In Marseille 2000". It's the soundtrack of the excellent live dvd / vhs of the same name. Obviously it would be the only recent live Mayhem release worth having, so it was limited to 500 copies worldwide. But "European / U.S. Legions" will forever be available.
Do the people behind record companies even LIKE the music they issue?