Marduk - Dark Endless
Review: This album is tied to the Amerikan tradition more than the Swedish, created with forceful chords and riffing derived of any anchoring except rhythm, resulting in music than can maintain a single direct narrative at once but landlocks itself to that principle and does not budge. This distills to a speedy but sloppy death metal band with a talented black metal singer screaming over it.
The rhythms of riffs are right where one would expect a mediocre death metal band to put them, and the chord progressions are of the broad interval leaps within standard power chord forms type which give little to melody or other constructs when their foundations and motives surround a key center and a tugging motion away, but little else, employing mainly chromatic or dissassociated wide intervals for aesthetic structure. While instrumentation outside of guitars is reasonable, no great labors are undertaken to the degree that this band lags roughly four years behind its contemporaries (death was well defined by 1992).
The one incredibly cool part of this album, oddly, is the intro, which is a loose composition of minimalist keyboard riffs and almost free-jazz extreme violin scraping. From there, however, the path is not so much downhill as straight across -- you can sing along with this one on your first listen.