(((O))) Review: Merciless – Behind The Realms Of The Dark

When it comes to legendary Swedish death metal bands, there are obviously a few groups that come to mind straight away, with the big four of Entombed, Dismember, Unleashed and Grave having the biggest profile. These bands garnered deserved praise and influence with albums like Left Hand Path and Clandestine by Entombed, Dismember’s Like An Ever Flowing Stream, Unleashed’s Shadows In The Deep and Into The Grave by Grave, and all of these albums are considered to be bona fide classics when it comes to Swedish death metal.

Around the same time as these bands first emerged from the catacombs of the Swedish underground, another band was making waves in much the same way, and that band was Merciless, a band who formed in 1986 and were key in making the Swedish death metal scene part of the lexicon of the emerging extreme metal scene which was happening all over the world by that point, alongside fellow like bands like (the pre-Entombed) Morbid and Obscurity.

With the band garnering acclaim with their first album, the death/thrash hybrid The Awakening from 1990, which was the first ever released on Deathlike Silence Productions, the label of infamous Mayhem guitarist and black metal martyr, the late Euronymous and its follow ups The Treasure Within (1992) and Unbound (1994), Merciless blazed a trail with their music and gained a whole host of fans from the underground but ultimately and unfortunately split in 94 with members going onto play in a whole host of bands including Entombed, Face Down and Nirvana 2002.

Merciless made a welcome return though in the late 90s before their self titled comeback album (although unfortunately their last to date) in 2002, and this gave the band a new profile and a chance for a whole new generation of fans to discover their music and go back from there.

With the name of Merciless much more known in metal circles these days, the band have brought out a treasure trove of material from the earliest days of Merciless in the form of Behind The Realms Of The Dark, a release that collects the bands first two demo tapes, Behind The Back Door from 1987 and Realm Of The Dark from 1988 and these two tapes capture the raw and youthful energy of a band morphing from the sounds of thrash metal into the darker and heavier sounds of the merging death metal scene.

Raw is the most important word to describe these demos but it is that rawness that gives them that energy and power and as Merciless blast through  songs like ‘Bestial Death’, ‘Satanic Slaughters’ and ‘Nuclear Attack’ with reckless abandon, you can clearly hear how Swedish death metal would come into the consciousness of the metal world and take over with its deathly greatness over the years as the seeds were sewn here.

Behind The Realms Of The Dark is a fantastic history lesson when it comes to Swedish death metal and these songs still stand up, with the rawness adding a definite charm and you can only think that the metal world is due a Merciless renaissance and even a return from the band.