Marduk – Wormwood

Marduk, the blaspheming four-piece from Norrköping, is back once again to rape your eardrums with a red-hot poker.

This year’s effort, their eleventh full-length album, is called “Wormwood”, and boy, it is a worthy successor to their albums “Plague Angel” and “Rom 5:12”! While servile followers of merciless musical warfare still get what they are looking for, Marduk again managed to implement melodic elements and add more atmosphere to their artistic onslaught.

“Wormwood” stands for perfect tunes to listen to while watching creepy still movies of old. Sinister, rather groovy songs take turns with familiar mercilessness. The vocals on “Funeral Dawn”, a piece straight from the graveyard, can be called epic without even coming close to an overstatement. Agreed, there’s not a lot of riffing variety, but the song compensates that with a shitload of eeriness. Listen to “Wormwood” from start to finish and regard it as a unit of pure evil that will surely push your mood down one notch if you’re already under the weather.

So better keep those razors away! Don’t get me wrong: this album definitely gives those who claim Marduk is not true underground Black Metal plenty of ammo. And they aren’t wrong with that complaint either, because Marduk is just Marduk. But judging by all those interviews with them out there, they pretty much don’t give a damn whether we like them or not anyway.