Martyrdöd don’t make arbitrary decisions. For the last decade, the heavy, agile, and inquisitive Swedish punk band has thatched a dozen different influences to its national heritage of D-beat and crustpunk. They’ve incorporated noise rock excess and death metal-like samples, doom metal deliberation and classic rock theatrics, using these pieces to build deliberately outward from a primitive and identifiable foundation. Those sounds speak to the wide, collective résumés of the band’s four members; they’re the pugnacious foil to Sweden’s post-everything Agrimonia, with whom Martyrdöd shares guitarist Pontus Redig. “I was born in 1982 when Discharge ruled the punk scene,” frontman Mikael Kjellman explained in a recent interview. If that’s where Martyrdöd starts, it’s several decades, styles and choices from where Elddop, their excellent and animated fifth LP, ends.
On Elddop, “Steg” and “Martyren”—its shortest and longest songs, respectively—land back-to-back. As with everything Martyrdöd does, the placement feels more instructive than mere happenstance; in only six minutes, the linked pair offers a complete summary of Martyrdöd’s sound and just how far it may go. “Steg” rips open as a D-beat wrecking ball, the no-nonsense rhythm section goading the hoarse screams of Kjellman like a pack of dogs in pursuit. A minute in, though, the guitars peel away, splitting from the pummel into a race through prismatic twists and turns. It’s a psychedelic smear shot through the base of a 100-second tantrum. But “Martyren” inverts that approach, with twin guitars spiraling over a mid-tempo rhythm section. The bright leads and gleeful solos suggest the inevitable arrival of some vaunted hero. The instrumental indulgence may seem like a preamble, but it lasts for four minutes, longer than most songs in Martyrdöd’s catalogue. Kjellman finally enters as the band picks up and latches down the tempo; he screams a few lines, lets the final word decay in exhaustion, and steps aside for one more resplendent solo. It’s a melodramatic guitar fantasy with a bit of hardcore slipped neatly in toward the end, an exclamation mark that comes before the end of a declarative sentence.
The unfurling triumph of “Martyren” is an exception for Martyrdöd, a group more prone to use crust punk as the core and not the accouterment. Still, it epitomizes the quartet’s quest to do more than turn up the amps, turn on the distortion and bluster through functional forebear mimesis. “Synd” claws through a doom introduction to land squarely in a marching punk marathon, but even at the song’s most ferocious clip, Kjellman and lead guitarist Redig push the limits of what can fit into the space. While one guitar barrels through the riff, the other pirouettes into loops of misdirection; at one point, Kjellman tracks a high-flying solo with his lead, his vocal flexibility showing just how carefully Martyrdöd manages the writing and rendering of these songs.
Even the most straightforward numbers here go at least one step beyond D-beat primacy. “Victoria”, for instance, adds a pop rapport by hanging bright guitars over a belligerent beat, like Torche snapping out of the sludge. And though the drums never pull up during “Varningens klockor,” the guitars lace around it, softening the blow with a tone so crisp it seems to jangle. Moments of Elddop hint at the Allman Brothers Band, AC/DC, and Nirvana. Martyrdöd, then, have accepted the spirit and sound of their lineage only on the condition that they’re not limited by it.
What’s most remarkable about Elddop isn’t the extent of the ground it covers, or the amount of memorable choruses and riffs it loads into the trek. Instead, these hyperactive songs never feel enervating or overworked. There are enough changes within these 15 tracks to elicit seasickness, from the stop-and-storm hyperactivity of “Mer skada än nytta” to the flips between chest-pounding hardcore and deep-brooding doom during “Tentakler.” In some sense, every Martyrdöd album has felt that way, but this is the first to pull the reins just enough for the material to be more inquisitive and involving than merely jumpy. What’s more, all of that intricacy never stands in the way of Martyrdöd’s sheer enthusiasm, the quality that makes Elddop so very bracing and breathless. These 15 tracks hit hard, early, and often, but Martyrdöd have become experts at finesse, too. They’re able to buttress the blows with elements that seem unexpected even when they repeat. Call it crust-plus.
