Marduk - Wormwood

Marduk - Wormwood

Wormwood is Marduk’s  11^th studio album and is of the black metal genre (some may consider this Brutal Black or Pure/Raw Black Metal). This album was released in October 2009 by Regain Records. This is the latest stuff from Swedish Black Metal band Marduk and it’s a mixture between super fast and super slow black metal.

Firstly this album’s tempo fluctuates between very fast and very slow many times. You have fast songs such as Whorecrown and This Fleshy Void,  you have the slow songs such as Funeral Dawn and To Redirect Perdition and finally you have the songs that like to have both such as the opening song No Where, No-One, Nothing and  also Into Utter Madness. This is a good thing about this album because it is never boring unlike some other bands that try too hard to be brutal all the time or the ones that are too slow all the time. This album has music for any kind of Black Metal fan but not so much for the atmospheric fans. The vocals are still great and still sound like classic Marduk. This album not only is brutally fast but it has some emotion to it such as the song Whorecrown. The part near the end where there is a guitar solo (kind of) that has a little atmosphere to it and sounds a little scary. To top it all off they also put some scary alien voice at the end of the song Whorecrown to have the listener leave with shivers down their spine. This Album is not something you should try to fall asleep with mainly because there are parts it where goes from 0 to 100 decibels in less than a second. The music is very tight in this album and can change mood without any notice such as in the song Phosphorous Redeemer. This is probably the best thing about this album and that it is not in monotone and therefore not boring.

This is an excellent album but some fans may be a little disappointed by this album. The main thing people will realise this that there is no song in this entire album that is all out brutal and there is nothing that compares to the song World Funeral for example. For anyone who is looking for 100% brutality you won’t find here. Sure there are tracks such as Whorecrown but even that song many not even compare to the pace of some of Marduk’s older work. They focus more on melody rather than speed on a few of their tracks which don’t exactly turn out as good as people may have hoped. Also the vocals are a bit different than their older stuff. It seems to be a little more distorted, this may be good for some listeners and bad for some. It depends what you like. Also the track Unclosing The Curse is a little odd.

Overall this album is still very good. It still has music that will send you speakers at 100mph but there are also tracks that are slower. There are 2 main moods in this album, fast and slow. I would recommend this album to anyone who likes older Marduk or Brutal, Pure/Raw black metal fans. I definitely do not recommend this to any fans of Ambient or Atmospheric Black metal fans. I also recommend the song Into Utter Madness for people who are new to this band, and the song Whorecrown to people who like Marduk’s sheer brutality. I give this album a 17/20.