Metal Reviews

More than half way through


Phantasies running free.

Marduk has not been part of my playlist for at least a decade or so and so the returning of this band to my listening schedule, is warmly welcomed. Marduk is some of the most extreme music, which I have ever heard, and some of the most heaviest and certainly some of the most well-produced. The presentation, and the layout of the musical product, is excellent and impressive, and the music heard, is crafted with a great deal of conviction and intensity.

Later Marduk has not decayed inasmuch as intensity is concerned but the changing of times and the atmospheric melodicism of the early releases most certainly has faded away with time and this is an inevitable reality of modernity in music. Nevertheless, the music performed, on this album, is pretty well War Metal and it speaks very loudly, and clearly, in respect to what it exactly is, most recently, and it also makes a bold statement about the many things, which it no longer can be, in a far-gone time.

If only this were remixed and remastered it would bring to life the buried dynamics which it already has but is hidden because of the original mixing and mastering. Many times early Marduk is very much akin to the olden days of Dissection and Sacramentum.

It is with no exaggeration that I declare this album would have defeated the spirits of Hercules himself. Even later Marduk is still a derivation or rather an atonal subsect of melodicism in Swedish DM, with much speedier and much heavier renditions. They can still be roughly classified with bands such as Unleashed, etc., 90's Swedish DM.

Emperor's last output has been on rotation, almost, without stoppage, setting aside a few years, where the album would go unnoticeably unheard, but other than those few years, the release is an ideal progressive BM release, which thereafter, sealed the legacy of the originators of symphonic BM, rather Ihsahn himself, and would end that subgenre of metal, with the ending of Emperor.