Whoredom Rife – Den Vrede Makt

In my review of ‘Winds of Wrath’ I had concluded that it was a logical continuation of what Whoredom Rife has stood for ever since they were conceived. At the same time, I lauded that the well of hatred and contempt from which they continue to pour their musical mould seems without end. And the same can be said for ‘Den Vrede Makt’. It is once again a superlative step of what has come before, fueled with a fire that seems to only grow stronger.

Opener ‘Den Vrede Makt’ is a superficially relentless onslaught, yet the subtle epic undertone has a distinct flair of Bathory, a ghost that haunts the entire album. Within its overwhelming fury, a subtle entrancing riff develops more overtly as the song builds towards the end. Similar lingering melodies haunt the subsequent ‘Fiender’, a song in which the prominent role of the bass and subtle keyboards add an entrancing humming. From the rather grandiose beginnings, the song then takes a more grim and suffocating turn into an intense and skincrawling escalation with multiple layers of haunting vocals. The thrusting ‘Hevnens Rett’ is the archtypical example of a Whoredom Rife track. With thundering drums and Immortal-esque riffs it is urgent, menacing and overpowering with an ominous strumming twist. The subsequent ‘Phantom Sword’ revolves more around a leading melody and has some neat shifting riffs, but the album reaches its apotheosis with the subsequent ‘Ravenous’.

Laden with excellent riffs, the track shifts from venomous strumming into a more groovy section that grows into a phenomenal tapping riff in the vein of classic Gorgoroth and Dødheimsgard. The rage then briefly subsides and a melancholic solo seems to turn the song around, only for vocalist K.R. to call for the coming doom. With possessed howls, the song then layers around a lingering solo, adding further levels of escalation as time goes on. As a brewing storm of hate that continues to darken the skies, the album then finally culminates into the bittersweet downpour of rain that is ‘The Beautiful End of All’. A midtempo monument, the band once again shows that they are not just about unbridled fury, but are equally skilled at crafting a more entrancing and yearning atmosphere through intricate melodicism. With lyrics such as “come darkness, come death” exemplifying this longing for the end, the song, indeed, is a beautiful end to it all.

As the genre has developed and expanded over the past three plus decades, Black Metal has diversified far beyond boundaries. With it, the fury that once instilled the birth of the genre has often faded away. Whoredom Rife is a testimony that this primordial rage still exists in Black Metal, and with ‘Den Vrede Makt’ the band once again enforces their status amongst today’s Norwegian Black Metal elite.