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"Mark of the Necrogram" is the seventh full-length studio album by Swedish blackened death metal band Necrophobic. It was released on February 23rd, 2018 on the Century Media Records label.
User Album Review
Stockholm’s Necrophobic may just be the most unlucky and criminally underrated band to have emerged from Sweden’s glorified extreme metal scene in the ‘90s. Despite a stellar discography carrying a cult classic, the much-adored “The Nocturnal Silence”, the band have been plagued with line-up issues and an undeserved apathy from heavy metal’s mainstream eyes. But their eighth record and Century Media Records debut, “Mark of the Necrogram,” may just earn Necrophobic the success they have deserved for years.
“Mark of the Necrogram” should, on paper, be the perfect album for Necrophobic to break the curse that has loomed over them since their inception. It is their debut with one of heavy metal’s “major” labels, Century Media Records, and marks the return of Anders Strokirk on vocals – his first studio performance with Necrophobic since the release of their classic debut, “The Nocturnal Silence.” But, does the quality of the music on this record reflect how important an album this should be for the band?
Absolutely. While not every album in Necrophobic’s back-catalogue is as instantly classic as their debut, there isn’t a bad album to bear their name. Kicking off with the title track, Necrophobic don’t walk the line between death and black metal so much as they dance seamlessly between the two, offering up classic black metal riffs one minute before laying into some devastating, Tampa-esque brutality the next. A trend throughout this album immediately displayed in “Mark of the Necrogram” is the use of absolutely massive hooks that penetrate your skull like an ice-pick. For all its brutality, “Mark of the Necrogram” is a surprisingly catchy album.
There is very little to complain about with “Mark of the Necrogram.” Stellar song-writing that mixes melody with brutality and a blackened atmosphere is present throughout the entirety of the release, the sound is crisp and clear without being over-produced, and the musicianship is excellent. All in, with a change in luck, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to see “Mark of the Necrogram” be a late-career game changer for Necrophobic, drawing them the attention and adoration they have been wrongly denied for far too long.
Reviewed by Fraser Wilson for metalwani.com.
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