siLLy puPPy Despite naming themselves after the Babyloanian god from ancient Mesopotamia who was associated with such things as water, vegetation, judgment and magic, the Swedish extreme metal band MARDUK emerged from the underground scene of Norrköping which is just a hop, skip and a jumpn away from Stockholm. Formed in 19990 by Morgan “Evil” Steinmeyer Håkansson who has been the only constant member ever since, right from the very beginning MARDUK was conjuring up the most vile and vicious forms of blasphemy possible and were really only upstaged by the church burning antics of bands like Mayhem. FUCK ME JESUS is the perfect title of their demo cassette later turned into a fully remastered CD release as it shows in full display the total irreverence and hostility towards Christianity wrapped up in the most caustic metal distortion and brutality that could be found in 1991 when this was released.

This little 12 minute and 40 second quickie is really only three full songs plus an intro and outro. Living up to their disgusting tasteless imagery right from the beginning the intro “Fuck Me Jesus” is basically a rape skit with a screaming woman being beaten and raped by an angry man who is supposed to be Christianity’s savior. Nice. To top that off the EP once released officially depicts a naked young woman shoving a crucifix up her ass. MARDUK has never been the most tasteful of bands but once you get past the shocking imagery and focus on the actual music it becomes much more interesting. While MARDUK has become one of the most famous black metal bands over the last few decades pumping out one hate fueled noisy album rant lambasting Christianity with pro-Satan fortified anthems rife with war and Third Reich themes, in the beginning they were more difficult to classify, at least musically speaking.

While black metal elements were clearly already present such as the hellish raspy vocal style of Andreas Axelsson complete with black metal distortion on guitars, the compositional style is more akin to death metal with heavy riffs and drumbeats that range from old school death metal drum rolls to black metal blastbeats. However some of the slower riffs have a very old school doom metal feel as if resurrected from Black Sabbath’s earliest output. There are also a few moments of pure grindcore freneticism on display. All in all i would say this earliest stage of MARDUK reminds me more of early metal bands like Hellhammer before separate branches of the extreme metal tree were sprouting from the parent source. After three tracks of actual music mayhem, the EP ends with a dark ambient outro that incorporates an epic soundtrack themed keyboard run with cymbals. Not a bad debut for MARDUK but hardly an essential one either. Better things were to come once they honed their sound a bit more and settled on a distinct style of playing. While all the elements are simmered down into an acceptable amalgamation of metal subs, the compositions aren’t anything overly exciting either.