Marduk is all about shock value. This is the same band whose early demo Fuck Me Jesus featuring a young lady finding religious "solace" in the cross on the cover brought them quite a bit of attention. Since then they've been busy writing their naughty music and attempting to push the envelope...or so they claim in interviews. However, there was another demo recorded around that time and this CD is the issuance of it. The short demo, recorded by Dan "I got my hand in the cookie jar again" Swanö shows a young Marduk furiously pouding out a cross between early black metal alà Bathory, Sodom and Hellhammer with a few touches from classic thrash bands like Destruction. Each song has its fair share of fast parts and slow sections. But there really isn't much here to distinguish Marduk from the rest of the hedonistic breathen.

Review by John Chedsey

Review date: 10/1998

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Thriving in their limited motif, Marduk has apparently been dwelling in their blitzcore hyper black metal to no true point. Opus Nocturne probably has appeal to anyone who must have their music as fast as possible with little breathing room. But even with Dan Swano's decent production much of what is heard here just blows by like so many corpsepainted tumbleweeds. If I don't force myself to pay close attention, I forget that the CD is playing and other things, such as scratching my lower regions and vacantly staring at the paint on the wall, become vitally more important. Eventually attention returns to the CD and they're doing THE EXACT SAME THING as when I stopped paying attention. Dynamics, you Swedish heathens you! Vary things up! And I'm not just talking "let's play fast, let's play slow" breaks. Marduk has demonstrated they can play fast. Now I'm curious if they'll ever bother with interesting songs.

Review by John Chedsey

Review date: 07/1999

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Pretty good middle-era effort from Marduk. Notorious for the maddened and maddening pace of their music, Marduk here change nothing as they march relentless - a fine decade of churning audience viscera. Visceral it is, surely, but is it anything more? I think so. Listen to the seamless incorporation of Mussorgsky's "Night on the Bare Mountain" into "Glorification of the Black God" - the arrangement is all careful design, no accident. "Beyond the Grace of God" and "The Black Tormentor of Satan" are both well composed and with typical Marduk-styled razor guitar, but with a distinct tinge of sadness never again found in their music. The vocalist's imperious rasp is most effective on "Dracul Va Domni" and "Legion" - the former being a slow, grinding fit of repetitive melody and the latter a blackwashed, impenetrable wall of sound. "Legion", incidentally, is my favourite Marduk song: Legion (this refers to the vocalist) phrases some great rapid fire blasphemies sharp in rhythm with the riff cycles.

Good lyrics, for the genre, proving that a genuinely threatening word-choice is indeed possible in this subculture. Excellent title, too (I've always found Marduk album and song titles to be the best in the genre. Poetic, really: "The funeral seemed to be endless" and "those of the unlight" are titles I wish i had come up with). And the cover art is very representative of the malice and charm of this record. It's hard to find tremendous depth in this particular genre of music; this album isn't particularly endearing and doesn't lend itself to a critical, enduring listenership - we'll all be half-deaf and burnt out at 30, otherwise. But why not thrash when your body and mind can take the abuse?

Review by Rahul Joshi

Review date: 04/2002

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