Marduk - Viktoria

With just under 30 years of continuous output under their belts, Marduk certainly know their way around old-school black metal, and even though I find frontman Mortuus’ philosophy about the necessity of Satanism in black metal to be silly, I can commend him and his bandmates for their proficiency with black metal’s most bare-bones approach.

Unfortunately there is a bit more to address with Marduk than their three decades of black metal creativity. I didn’t follow it all too closely, but a few years ago the band were held up from performances in Canada, I believe, due to being targeted by an antifacsist group in the area. The band have consistently written about military history, including WWII, and have been accused before  of having Nazi connections of some sort. Again, I’m not too informed on what exactly they have or haven’t done other than that the band have denied every accusation I’ve heard of.

That being said, all of the lyricism on this album pertains to war history in some way, with a few songs focusing again on the Second World War. While listening to this album, I read along to the lyrics to see if they perhaps provided any insight into Marduk’s beliefs or any hint of what they’ve been accused of.

I mentioned before that I’m not all too up to date on whatever Marduk were accused of; I’ve never really been too invested in them or their music really. I’ve heard a few of their albums and I remember enjoying the sound of some of them. But if I were to find them to be promoting Nazism in their music, I wouldn’t have any problem going in hard on criticizing it (just to quell any potential uncertainty on if I wouldn’t want to address it and just sweep it under the rug), nor would I with any other band. And honestly after reading the lyrics from this album at least I can understand where there might be some confusion and speculation about the band’s stance on Nazism, but I didn’t really see anything in the lyrics other than poetic historical recounts akin to rough-draft-ish Iron Maiden lyrics. But speaking of Maiden…

The song “Tiger I” is probably the most prone to being used as a portrayal of the band being sympathetic of fascism. The song essentially serves as an ode to the German Panzertank VI used in WWII, with the lyrics revolving around the mightiness of the machine and its terrifying presence on the battlefield, nothing unusual for war songs. Yet I found myself stopped in my track to read into the subtext of the song when I read the line “Guardians of the Reich”. It’s a line that could easily be pointed to as evidence of the band glorifying the Nazi regime, but I quickly remembered the many songs Bruce Dickinson has sung about ugly times in history and how Iron Maiden simply recounting what happened through music wasn’t done to condone whatever atrocities were being sung about. “Run to the Hills” is not glorifying the slaughter of the native Americans; it’s a retelling of that time in history through song, and it actually paints a pretty ugly picture of the settlers who were committing those horrible actions as well. “Tiger I” is not openly glorifying the Nazi regime itself, but kind of playing with fire I suppose by flattering one of its instruments of war. The song is about the tank, and the line about the tank defending the Third Reich is accurate. At face value, it’s nothing more than a war song about WWII, but it definitely does raise questions, which does not automatically condemn the band, as some are so quick to do at the slightest sniff of anything potentially “problematic”, until more concrete proof of actual Nazi sympathy can be found (if it hasn’t already and I don’t know about it).

Anyway, aside from the tedious discussion about a band I only kind of care about maybe being Nazi sympathizers or not, the music is pretty solid for the most part. It’s nothing mindblowing; it’s classic early era black metal with few bell and whistles thrown in. Mortuus’ vocals across the album sound significantly rabid, especially on the opener, “Werewolf”. The song “Narva” features chaotic tremolo picking quite fitting for the wartorn carnage the song depicts. The title track features pretty fast vocal delivery, but it breaks the mold nicely with a slower, dissonant chord-driven section that sounds DSBM-inspired. I also like the musicality of “Tiger I”, the anticipatory pauses adding to the menacing silence before the canon blast of the tank whose slow, crushing crawl over the landscape is depicted well by the sustained guitar chords. The album does have its duller moments too, “The Devil’s Song” being a particularly unexciting cut. But for the most part the album wields the primitive sounds of early black metal with evident proficiency and they provide a good example of the sound’s early form, doing a lot with a little and not having to rely on big production tricks to make their case.