Review: Marduk – Frontschwein

Posted on May 7, 2015 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”.

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 June 12, 2012 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: Arckanum – Helvítismyrkr

Posted on October 10, 2011 by necromoonyeti

I am not overly familiar with Arckanum. I associate the one-man act more with Johan “Shamaatae” Lahger’s peculiarity than with his music. From releasing a music video frequently featured among metal’s cheesiest to releasing an album absurdly titled ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ, his minor exploits will perhaps always incline me to regard Arckanum with an eye towards the ridiculous. ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ did, however, receive some pretty gushing reviews (I never got around to listening to it enough to judge one way or the other), and when I saw that he’d released a new one I thought it due time to give him a shot.

Helvitt

Arckanum has a somewhat odd history musically as well. After releasing three full-length albums between 1995 and 1998, he took a decade long hiatus, not reappearing until 2008 and releasing a full length album every year since. (Sviga Læ, which was never brought to my attention, came out between ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ and Helvítismyrkr.)

In the meantime, Shamaatae has been an active writer on the subjects of “Chaos-Gnosticism” and “Anti-Cosmic Satanism”. A scholar in his field I’m sure. Whatever all that means, it apparently falls into a similar boat as the rituals practiced by fellow Swedes Dissection and Watain. Jon Nödtveidt took his own life in proclaimed accord with such teachings, and though I can never resist a tasteless joke that he had listened to the final studio cut of Reinkaos for the first time moments before his death, suffice to say these guys take themselves seriously.

One might expect that sort of intensity and personal conviction to be reflected in the music.

Nifldreki

Throughout Helvítismyrkr though, I’m not really hearing it. The album is in no sense bad, but it rarely surpasses the generic. Neither the song writing nor the atmosphere in which it is presented conjure for me much beyond a decent musician’s create outlet. He fails to take me beyond himself.

The album does have some catchy feature riffs however, Nifldreki being a prime example, and, the slow grind In Svarta aside, Shamaatae maintains a breakneck pace throughout the majority of each track, giving Helvítismyrkr a particular coherence and consequent appeal. Again, there is absolutely nothing bad about this work, I just had higher hopes.

Svartr ok Þursligr

Helvítismyrkr’s high point almost beyond debate is Svartr ok Þursligr. The breaks in the opening riff come in hard rock fasion that really drive the song, if in a peculiarly fun sort of way. Given the background, I was expecting the best tracks to be more on the esoteric side, but Shamaatae seems to be in his prime on Helvítismyrkr when he’s rocking out.

What propels the song from being merely more fun than the rest to being something really outstanding follows the transition about 3 minutes in. He incorporates a woeful, weeping violin that, aside from completely catching me off my guard, pairs up with the tremolo guitar with astounding success. It’s something I’ve never heard before in black metal, and the effect is a sort of tragedy in the positive sense–maybe not the vibe he intended to deliver, but one that certainly appeals. I can’t imagine it being sustained throughout an album without sounding over the top, so I wouldn’t encourage him to push for more of it in the future, but as a single instance it works exceptionally well.

I am not sufficiently well-versed in Arckanum’s catalog to personally recommend better efforts, but if the sparks of talent you’ve heard in these sample tracks entice you, ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ seems to be popularly regarded as his best work. As for Helvítismyrkr, it is a decent effort but nothing to brag about.