Tag Archives: marduk

Review: Marduk – Frontschwein

Posted on by necromoonyeti

A part of me feels totally out of my comfort zone reviewing Marduk, but I keep coming back to the band over the years in spite of it. The classic Swedish style of black metal, as popularized by bands like Dark Funeral, Naglfar, and of course Marduk, never managed to appeal to me much. It was all about this relentless brutality–an aesthetic not far removed from death metal–when I was turning to black metal for its occult appeal. It was Satan as a cold-hearted masochist, but I wanted to legitimize Catholic blood libel. Live dissection vs goat sodomy. That’s pretty clear, no?

But, aside from the fact that they were just better at it than everyone else, Marduk initially stood out to me for their song titles and lyrics. “Christraping Black Metal”, “Fistfucking God’s Planet”, “Jesus Christ… Sodomized”, this stuff was priceless. I think when I viewed it as a comedy I could get into the over-the-top, machine gun-paced blast beats as something delightfully ridiculous.

That sort of entertainment value can’t hold out forever, and it was ultimately Marduk’s shift towards martial themes that kept me attentive. They did it on Panzer Division Marduk in 1999, and they’ve turned to it again with the Iron Dawn EP in 2011 and now Frontschwein. If there is any one thing that this style of music captures effectively, it is 20th century warfare.

song: Frontschwein

Marduk capture the violent chaos of war on a level I have only heard rivaled by Germany’s Endstille, and while modern themes do not permeate all of their albums, they stand at the center on Frontschwein. The album recounts events in World War II from the perspective of Germany as a bloodthirsty machine reveling in cold destruction behind its thin veil of justifications. The connection is not merely lyrical, though Mortuus’ vocals are surprisingly discernible, allowing bits and pieces of war imagery to seep into your head unaided by a lyrics sheet; you can hear to conflict in the music: sliding guitars as falling bombs, blast beats as bullets. It’s methodical, rhythmic, and relentless, in contrast to the more eclectic approach the band has taken on Satanic-themed albums like Serpent Sermon. It is Marduk as I like them best.

That being said, it does feel repetitive at times. This style always does, to me at least, and I feel like Marduk relegated their less interesting songs to the middle, bookending the best of them. “Frontschwein” is followed by the incredibly catchy headbanging march of “The Blond Beast”, and Mortuus’ constant screaming of “Afrika” in the song of the same name forces your mind to picture a bloody desert battle between Rommel and Patton’s grunts. “Wartheland”‘s slow pummel with distinct lyrics like “succumb to domination” feels like an endless wave of Nazi forces marching in to conquest and occupation. The track titles in general go a long way towards steering the music towards its intended imagery. (I absolutely love the album title. I don’t know if it’s a common word or one of the band’s own crafting, but it certainly projects the overarching subject matter: humans as bloody fodder in an unstoppable military machine.)

But by “Rope of Regret”, my ears grow a bit numb to the pummeling. I enjoy the song when I listen to it in isolation, but I rarely can remain attentive long enough to reach it if I’m listening to the album as a whole. The next four tracks, all fairly typical in style, fade together for me whatever their individual worth. “503” is ultimately the song that draws me back in. A song of conquest, it drastically slows down the pace, listing in a dominant voice the conquests of the 503rd Heavy Panzer Battalion. It makes me snap back from my zoned-out state and again picture the album as a vision of German brutality in World War II rather than a jumble of noise. The song is well-placed, because it leads the way into “Thousand-Fold Death”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttXC9Z0UJQQ

song: Thousand-Fold Death

And “Thousand-Fold Death”… holy shit, this song alone is worth buying Frontschwein for. It’s got the best guitar licks on the album, but this song is all about Mortuus. He does things with his voice on this track that will give you motion sickness. It’s not just the sheer quantity of words per second he manages to belt out–his clarity while doing it is unbelievable. If I ever doubted that Mortuus was an incredible vocalist before this song, I certainly don’t now. The album ends with “Warschau III Necropolis”, an eerie, ambient mix of samples from militant speeches and battles, brass, and bizarrely distorted spoken words that manages to capture the grim nature of the album through a totally different means.

There is a reason why I have listened to Marduk more than any other band that plays that brutality-driven Swedish varient of black metal, and Frontschwein captures what I like about them best. I am a bit hesitant to say that I like it more than Endstille’s Infektion 1813, but those two albums definitely stand leagues above anything else I have heard in a genre of metal that, I’ll admit, I seldom find to be very creative or inspiring.

Check out Frontschwein by Marduk on Century Media.

Review: Marduk – Serpent Sermon

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Well, here it is mid-June, and I’ve yet to write any album reviews. Getting back into the habit is the hardest part, especially in the wake of one of the finest years for music I can recall. But after half a year of enjoying 2011’s finest fruits, I can no longer pretend that there are no new releases out there. Serpent Sermon seemed like a logical place to begin. Marduk, after all, have been lurking in the shadows for 22 years now, and it’s nice to start things off somewhere familiar.

Video removed by the capitalist pigs at Century Media who don’t want you to sample their products before buying them.

Serpent Sermon

I had very mixed expectations going into Serpent Sermon. The band has gone through a number of transitions over the years, and since the replacement of vocalist Legion with Mortuus in 2004 they just haven’t appealed to me all that much. On the other hand, last year’s Iron Dawn ep was some of the most appealing material they’ve yet released. I read that the band did not intend Serpent Sermon to be a continuation of Iron Dawn, but you never know.

This album kicks off in typical Marduk fashion, with blast beats entering precisely where you expect them and, soon enough, that quintessential Marduk climbing chord progression (around 1:25). The song briefly perks up with a strikingly catchy chorus twenty seconds later, then repeats, with some nuance variations and a particularly tortured howl out of Mortuus towards the end.

It is immediately apparent that, just as the band had stated, Serpent Sermon does not take the same approach as last year’s effort. But where it is headed is hard to say. My love/hate relationship with Mortuus shines in the opening track, where he bores me to tears at 1:10 and 2:20 and then gives me shivers at 3:45. It feels to me as though the singer and the rest of the band aren’t always on the same page. Where they hit it off they’re better than ever, but they just as often seem to be in opposition. Do Mortuus’s twisted vox require a stronger break from standard Marduk riffs than Morgan Håkansson and co are ready to grant, or does he ham it up just a bit too much to lend the songs consistency? Serpent Sermon exemplifies a persistent problem throughout the album: a lot of songs have their greatness broken by sudden lapses into drivel.

Video removed by the capitalist pigs at Century Media who don’t want you to sample their products before buying them.

Messianic Pestilence

The more I listen to the album, the more I am inclined to define it by Mortuus and Håkansson’s successes and failures to engage each other. The album as a whole is widely varied in style, much to its benefit. It provides samples of the various ways in which the band functions together, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. On tracks like Messianic Pestilence, Mortuus willingly embraces an older school of Marduk with great success, and you get a taste for what they might sound like today if no real stylistic variance had accompanied 2004’s change in lineup. Good stuff, but nothing new.

Video removed by the capitalist pigs at Century Media who don’t want you to sample their products before buying them.

M.A.M.M.O.N.

But M.A.M.M.O.N. is where it really all clicks. From the driving blast-beat opening, erratic deviations into darkness and twisted chaos writhe forth. The initial sudden cessation of aggression is complete, giving Mortuus uncontested center stage, and from the ooze he spews across the soundscape a chaotic torment of guitar fury explodes. The entire song structure repeats, typical of Marduk, but in the end we are treated to a twisted amalgamation of slow, demented guitar tones laid over seemingly incompatible blast beats that give off an air of madness. On this track more than any other, I really feel as though the band has all come together and really accepted their own new sound without any misgivings.

That being said, I must confess that I’ve barely given Marduk’s last few full-length albums the time of day. I listened to them in the background a handful of times at best and quickly lost interest. It is quite possible that what struck me as great on M.A.M.M.O.N. was nothing “new”, and I simply failed to notice it before. But either way, I think it’s Serpent Sermon’s strongest point.

Video removed by the capitalist pigs at Century Media who don’t want you to sample their products before buying them.

Into Second Death

What makes late ’90s/early 2000s era Marduk my favorite is its unrelenting, almost comical brutality. Songs like Christraping Black Metal and Fistfucking God’s Planet are so aurally and lyrically offensive that I can’t help but love them. The whole Swedish black metal sound is perfect for this sort of thing. It’s a style with little room for variation, and it always seems to work best for me when taken to extremes, whether the result is comical, as on Panzer Division Marduk, or gut-wrenching, as on the Iron Dawn ep. I would absolutely love to hear a follow-up of Iron Dawn, but in the meantime, harking back to Panzer Division, let’s not forget that this band has a sense of humor.

If they didn’t, I don’t think Into Second Death would be entirely possible. It’s the most “black and roll” song I’ve heard since Carpathian Forest released Fuck You All!!!! (one of the best things to ever happen to metal), and if Marduk could throw together a full album of it I would be absolutely delighted.

As a whole, Serpent Sermon has a lot of ups and downs. Expect a lot of variation both in style and in quality (at least by Swedish black metal standards). It is no landmark album, but it’s true to Marduk past and present, and as such it’s better than most else out there. At the same time, it leaves me really wondering where the band is headed. It’s a definite to be continued… M.A.M.M.O.N. showed a lot of promise for the path they’re currently on, while the album’s total distinction from Iron Dawn leaves me wondering whether the band has had two separate full lengths in mind all along. On the other hand, you just know they’re going to love playing Into Second Death live, and my biggest hope is that that inspires an album.

Review: Marduk – Iron Dawn EP

Posted on by necromoonyeti

I woke up this morning thinking “I want to listen to some new black metal.” I pulled up my usual sources and subsequently spent about 20 minutes scrolling through “shoegaze black” and “post-black” and “progressive black” “transcendental esoteric aesthetic neo-black” and, well, I was getting annoyed. Then I remembered I’d overlooked a new Marduk EP back in May, and now I am happy.


Warschau 2: Headhunter Halfmoon

Because Marduk never disappoint. They certainly aren’t among my favorite black metal bands, but they come with a sort of guarantee. When you see “Marduk”, you hear violent, completely unforgiving Swedish-style black metal, pretty much without exception. Even their mellow moments are by average standards brutal. That has at least been the case since I started listening to them (Panzer Division Marduk, 1999), and it certainly holds on Iron Dawn.

Typical Swedish-style black metal has always been a little bland to me, and I think that’s the only reason I don’t sing their praises more. Within that limited genre, of the bands I’ve heard they’re second only to Endstille.

Modern warfare has been a common theme in their music for a long time now, and they don’t necessarily bring anything new to that perspective on Iron Dawn, but I do think this EP, especially this song, makes exceptionally good use of sound effects. The sirens and exploding bombs seem to meld with the relentless blast beats perfectly to maintain the song’s intensity.


Prochorovka: Blood and Sunflowers

The album progressively mellows out, though “mellow” is a very relative term here. For the sake of not posting the EP in its entirety, I’ll go ahead and skip the middle track. (Though I must say, until I read the track title, “Wacht Am Rhein: Drumbeats of Death”, I thought he was screaming “droppings of death”, as in a broken English attempt at describing aerial bombardment, and had in mind a vision of especially volatile poop.)

Prochorovka is a slow plod that maintains the brutality in spite of dropping the blast beats. Again the warfare sound effects serve as percussion and paint a nasty vision of sub-human slaughter. Good times.

I don’t have much to say about Iron Dawn, or any other Marduk album for that matter. They’ve just kept doing their thing over the years, and if you like one album there’s a good chance you’ll like them all. In a time when straight up brutal black metal with no pretentious trappings is getting harder and harder to come by, it served my momentary mood well.

Review: Endstille – Infektion 1813

Posted on by necromoonyeti

I’d never heard of Endstille until their 2009 release, Verführer. The album name, coupled with a cover which featured Kaiser Wilhelm II holding a bloody butcher’s knife, was just too delicious to overlook. It turned out to be one of my surprise favorites of the year. I wouldn’t call it original. In a lot of ways it reminded me of Dark Funeral–high production value, a mix that highlights drums over guitar, lyrical themes regulated to war and anti-Christianity. But where I could never get into the latter band, Endstille really impressed me. The same description fits their new album.

Trenchgoat

Endstille achieve their power through brutality and relentless drive, coupled with an acute eye towards German history. Not too many black metal bands emerge out of Germany. It’s a country with more historical precedence for themes of death and violence than anywhere in Scandinavia, serving the style well, but for the same reason there’s a lot more controversy involved in embracing the subjects. Endstille have been accused of right-wing affinities, even mislabeled nsbm by some, but the lyrics are discernible enough to verify the absence of a political stance.

Something that make their lyrics more cutting, and perhaps more controversial in turn, is the deadpan expression they hold throughout both albums that I’ve heard. I can’t help but mention Marduk’s triumph of 1999, perhaps the most brutal black metal album in existence at the time. It was lyrically and musically extreme to such an extent that the band themselves couldn’t fully take it seriously. The cheesy rock and roll finish to Panzer Division Marduk, delicious track titles like Fistfucking God’s Planet and Christraping Black Metal… you knew they were having fun. With the one exception of Verführer’s cover art, Endsille manage to avoid any hint of enjoyment. The effect isn’t better, just different. You never smile with Endstille. The comic appeal is substituted for a more authentic brutality.

But Infektion 1813 does seem to be lacking in catchy moments. Marduk, for all their redundancy, were at their height capable of writing some unforgettable songs. Baptism By Fire probably gets stuck in my head more than any other black metal song out there. Closer to home, Verführer had a number of memorable spots. Suffer in Silence struck me most. It surprised me just now, listening to it again, to realize Iblis only shouts “fuck God’s kingdom” two times. Coming in the midst of a steady plod with nothing obvious to distinguish it, it is yet a line you can’t miss on your first listen to the album or forget afterwards. The track currently playing on the other hand, while good as a whole, possesses nothing with which to really distinguish itself.

Bloody H (The Hurt-Gene)

The other band I want to compare Infektion 1813 to is Carpathian Forest. Now, I am probably alone in thinking that Fuck You All!!!! is the best straight-up black metal album ever recorded, but suffice to say Carpathian Forest are among the most underrated big names in the genre. I didn’t realize my first few listens through Infektion that Endstille got a new vocalist. I thought Iblis just got a lot better. Zingultus, the new singer, sounds strikingly similar. But there is a certain shrillness to his still relatively deep vocals that made me immediately think of Nattefrost, where Iblis never did. Nattefrost is my favorite black metal vocalist, so there you go.

The other comparison to Carpathian Forest really stands out in this current track, Bloody H. It’s got beats you can really bang your head to. The album review I saw on Encyclopaedia Metallum described it as “driving black grooves via Darkthrone”, and that’s more accurate than I can word it, but with Darkthrone’s commitment to low production value the similarity isn’t so obvious. Rather, it made me think first and foremost of Fuck You All!!!. Consider that quite a compliment.

Ok, bear with me for a minute here. Yes, I just linked a Rammstein song. I haven’t listened to them since Sehnsucht came out in what, 1997? There’s really not much I can say about them. I could never get past the whole electronica thing, even when I was some idiot kid worshiping Korn and the like. But there was one song on that album that blew my mind at the time and, much to my surprise, listening to it for perhaps the first time in fourteen years, still does. I’m sticking Klavier in here to draw attention to that special thing about the German language that’s so stereotypical that it tends to be forgotten in practice: It sounds evil as fuck.

Eh, and maybe this song was my first introduction to tremolo picking and I never knew it. But whatever, moving on:

Endstille (Völkerschlächter)

The final track on Infektion 1813 is hands down the most brilliant thing I’ve heard by them, and it would be boring in any other language. I mean, the music consists of a seven second long riff that repeats for eleven minutes. The lyrics consist of Zingultus naming a bunch of historic figures. That’s it. That’s really it. It’s about as minimalistic as a black metal song could ever hope to be. And it’s one of the darkest songs I have ever heard.

Why? Because he names them all with a German accent, and because it’s not called “Mass Murder” or “Slaughter or the People” or anything like that. It’s called Völkerschlächter, and the music is so repetitive that only the words matter. The first time I really paid attention to it I sat in constant anticipation waiting to hear who he’d name next, each figure smashing me in the face with the atrocities they committed.

I’m not saying Infektion 1813 is extraordinary, or even necessarily as good as Verführer, but it’s one of the best black metal albums we’ll hear in 2011. Don’t let this one sneak by you.