Dark Funeral evokes mixed feelings within me. I enjoy many of their black metal (influenced heavily by Swedish death metal) riffs, but their compositions are a bit repetitious, sometimes making me bored with the song. On this EP, they have a heavy Marduk-ish sound in their production and writing. Like Marduk, they took a bit of death metal, removed the chunky parts and threw in some high speed black metal for a delicious cake mix of brutality. All is recorded and mixed well by Daniel Swano. All instruments are played cleanly. Again, some really cool riffage, but its missing the icing of a bit more varied composition. In retrospect (from 2000), a fine step in the evolution of Swedish black metal.

© 2000 j. mcintyre