MARDRAUM - BEYOND THE WITHIN

I enjoy black metal, a lot. I enjoyed ENSLAVED's most recent albums, fully progressive-black- metal records. I even liked ENSLAVED's first, Vikingligr Veldi, and the second, Frost. It's actually how far removed this album is from the black metal sound of the band's past what I can't manage to enjoy. The band started to develop into something more after Frost, something different, and we all know that work has rendered great fruits in the Norwegian's most recent records. But I think Mardraum was a slight bump in an otherwise smooth road to musical brilliance.

Mardraum avoids atmosphere and darkness and casts aside typical black elements like nostalgia and tremolo riffs and adopts a more death/thrash metal-oriented style more in the vein of 80's bands like KREATOR. The problem is, the music sounds uninspired, lacking in ideas. The band sounds like a hybrid between those 80's bands and more noisecore-oriented black metal artists like MARDUK. But while the Swedish manage to make their music attractive even amidst all the violence and noise, the Norwegian fail completely, delivering an endless procession of uninteresting riffs with little subtlety, atmosphere, or any hint of progressiveness.

ENSLAVED has never been a band that shines in violence. They shine in creating more atmospheric, epic black metal with progressive tendencies. This is proven here in MARDRAUM, an album that even lacks that semi-epic factor that informed most of the band's viking-metal's past.

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