Marduk is one of the most easy-to-overlook bands in the realm of black metal, simply because, upon a cursory inspection, they seem to play little more than blast beat-happy black metal throughout their whole discography. The band’s career is however much more varied than such a premature assumption would have most people believe, stretching from a very primitive, death metal-oriented beginning towards a relatively cyclic alternation between the faster, more brutal albums and some considerably slower-paced releases. Positioned at the very beginning of this evolution is Dark Endless, a unique hybrid of death metal and black metal released at about the same time as several of the more influential Norwegian Second Wave of black metal albums.
Dark Endless begins with an inconspicuous one-minute intro track, The Eye of Funeral, which consists of little more than a few keys giving off a rather cold, ghostly atmosphere in preparation for the much more straightforward songs to follow. As mentioned before, this album has little to do with the Marduk of today. Instead, the music here is a type of darker death metal sealed inside a black metal aesthetic. The production has little to do with the band’s subsequent albums, being considerably cleaner, and the song structures themselves are heavily rooted in the Swedish death metal style of the early 1990’s. In this sense the album may be compared with Darkthrone’s Soulside Journey, with both albums being death metal beginnings in the careers of two well-known black metal bands.
The death metal present herein surprises the listener by its nature: the Marduk sound is definitely there, admittedly in a more primitive form, and some songs border on the more doom-oriented side of death metal, with slow passages being prevalent in several spots throughout the whole album. The Sun Turns Black as Night, Within the Abyss and especially Holy Inquisition are excellent examples of this well-hidden part of Marduk’s career, where they actually played slow death metal. One of these songs, Holy Inquisition, is also the last track off the album and its definite highlight. Starting with an incredibly epic slow riff, the song then proceeds to slowly distinguish itself as a first rate death metal track, highlighting everything that’s great about this album. It even has an awesome solo near the end, right before the song (and the album’s) closing passage, a kind of demonic whispering done relatively well.
Interestingly enough, while the album’s sound is mostly death metal, at least from an instrumental point of view, the rest of it is unmistakably rooted in the then-nascent (Second Wave) black metal movement. The vocals have very little to do with the usual stuff done in death metal, being a much darker type of shriek done by Andreas Axelsson. He’s the vocalist responsible for all the pre-black metal Marduk work, consisting of the Fuck Me Jesus and Here’s No Peace EPs as well as this album (the EPs have no exclusive songs bar the Bathory covers). The atmosphere created by this album is also readily distinct from the classic Swedish death metal sound, being much darker, somewhat like Hypocrisy’s Osculum Obscenum only more so. From a lyrical standpoint Dark Endless is undoubtedly a black metal album, dealing exclusively with darkness, death, chaos, the night, blackness and a general fascination with the supernatural.
Dark Endless is a very good record, on par with some of the best extreme metal coming out of Scandinavia during the period. It’s also considerably different from the later Marduk releases, so liking or hating the band’s newer stuff doesn’t necessarily imply either enjoyment or hatred of Dark Endless. On a small additional note, everyone interested in acquiring this may be interested in the re-release version which contains some (very raw) live material but whose artwork is vastly inferior to the original, having little more than the band logo, the title and a sad-looking statue.
Sample: youtube.com/watch?v=dFK8ZIyy22Q
