Mordax
Violence Fraud Treachery

“Mordax is clever! They understand that simplicity is more brutal than a million notes per hours upon layers of inhumanly fast kick drums, Mordax have a groove to their stuff and an attitude that jumps right out of the speakers and punch you in the face! Less is Mor... Dax!!” that is what Swedish musician/producer says about this danish band. That can be said to be quite high praise for a band calling themselves biting or snappish as is two of the possible translations of Mordax. Osmerus mordax is the fish called Rainbow Smelt, Mordacia mordax is the Australian Lamprey so that you have two possible inspirations for the name of this band who recently released their debut album Violence Fraud Treachery. So using the “less is more” philosophy they at least seem interesting on the face of it but what seems and what is can be different beasts.

Death metal I would call this, with a hint of thrash and some melodic touches but still based in a rather basic style of death metal. With the difference from many other bands that Mordax has a brutally heavy sound and do to not fill their music with smattering drums, crazy fast guitars and a soundscape filled with sound that flow together into a mass. Mordax has a separation between the instrumental elements of this band, that gives the music a heavier sound and sets them a little bit apart from much of the rest of the extreme metal genre. The eleven tracks on the album has a decent variation, especially for being a death metal album. It takes 47 minutes to play through the entire album which has a powerful sound and a modern, very good production as well as a very mature sound which makes it a bit hard to really believe that this is a debut album, it sounds much more mature than that.

Death metal for me gives usually something of a “so what” kind of feel or worse, there are very few exceptions to this as this genre is usually populated by people wanting to live up to some kind of industrial standard of the genre. Mordax is not one of these everyday dull and ridiculous death metal bands that usually populate the genre, Mordax skips the typical riffs and blastbeats and in that they become much more brutal and sounds as death metal should sound, aggressive, powerful and evil but at the same time there are some melodic breathers making this album even more dynamic and powerful and thinking of death metal of the more traditional kind I think this is amongst the absolute best albums I have heard.

The variation of the tracks makes this album last for the entire playing time and that is also something that many extreme metal bands has problems with as they are usually one dimensional and becomes a bit boring towards the end. Which is not the case for Mordax and their debut album where all songs live up to a high standard way beyond what their discography show. The best songs on the album is the first track after the intro Trademark Strangulation, the video track Monarch of All which also feature Dan Swanö, and the instrumental song called Contrapasso which is very good. So I can clearly recommend this album for anyone who can appreciate good music no matter the genre. It is an impressive debut and I advice you to remember the name Mordax as I am certain that we will see a lot more of this band in the future.