Album Review: Mardom - Dead Soul Age
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Formed in 2019 as the solo project of guitarist Morgomir, Mardom emerged from the Black Metal heart of Poland with the EPs The Path of No Return and Longing for a New Dawn, before arriving at this, the project’s debut full-length.
In his excellent book, Black Metal: The Cult Never Dies, Volume One (London: Cult Never Dies, 2015) author Dayal Patteson opines the Polish BM scene quickly found traction due to a combination of its proximity to the Scandinavian model, and the country’s adherence to the Catholic tradition. This was the earlier Nineties, and the Polish people had suffered under the Communist yoke for almost forty years by the time the Berlin Wall came down.
Dead Soul Age clocks in at around forty-minutes and features just six-tracks, but each of this half-dozen shows a slightly different aspect of Mardom: from the mid-tempos of opener If Hate Now Reigned to the blasts of the closing title tune.
Running throughout the album is a sense of melancholy and dread, allowing it veer into depressive areas without ever becoming a fully-fledged DSBM release. If Hate… blends the morose with darkly atmospheric riffs, raising the tempo to give the whole thing a Gorgoroth feel.
The closing minutes of this, and its immediate successor, Spojezenie, adopt mode of Black Metal more familiar to the Swedish stylings of Dark Funeral than the likes of Shining, Silencer or Forgotten Tomb. Before reaching that point, Spojezenie takes a gravel-throated trip with a sermon of mournful repetition and sobbing guitars.
Buried in the Dust of the Stars introduced that BM trope of triplets for the first time on the album, mixing an epic, existential subject with some opening folk sounding guitar; the monolithic opening to the grim, dank Inverted Sun Darkness offers little respite prior to the flight of soaring guitars at the midpoint.
The closing pair of Unseen Dreams and Dead Soul Age are where Mardom are at their most Diabolic; fast and furious tempos prevail, drums rampage, and the vocals sink deeper into the infernal pit. Unseen Dreams has the feel of finality about it, with the title track following as an evil coda, complete with twisted guitar lines and something wholly unsettling that we hadn’t encountered before.
Dead Soul Age, the song, gives the sense that Mardom were keeping their powder dry and giving just enough of a teaser to whet the appetite for what will come in album number 2.
The overarching vibe I took from Dead Soul Age, the album, was of a band exploring the safer areas of the genre. They reminded me at times of post-Gaahl-era Gorgoroth, both musically on If Hate Now Reigns and Buried in the Dust of the Stars, and vocally, with an acid-voiced performance reminiscent of both Pest and Atterigner.
Yet, there’s enough, especially on the title track to tell us Mardom have plenty more to say and have plenty more ways to say it; which means Dead Soul Age is a worthy opening gambit from a project with an interesting future.
