Sometimes you wake up and the sun is shining warmly on your face and the day is good. Sometimes you wake up and you’re being savagely beaten by a bunch of angry Czechs with rakes. Dødsverk is really kinda similar to the latter, in that it’s a 32 minute fistfuck by some ridiculous Norwegians and all the ass they tear out of you. All of this, of course, being awesome.
The occasional experimental aside should not lull the listener into a false sense of security, as in “Dømt til Frihit”, as these songs are short, brutish, and sharpened to the point of severing limbs. Vicious blasts and theme-show bass combine in “Skjærsild” and promptly melt everything you hold dear. Things only seem kinda conventional (for death metal standards) on early track “Leviatan,” after which it’s an exercise in rapid-fire evisceration and salting.
This peculiar kind of lounge-room jazz pops up from time to time, always an enormous curiosity and always likely to leave you unprepared for the face-rape that follows. A short-natured review like this is an extension of the album itself, though there are many tiny elements flying in every direction that help elevate this cacophony to exalted status, you don’t need to catch them all to understand it. Gaze upon this phenomenal album cover and despair, Horizon Ablaze and Dødsverk will end you.
“Der Untergang” stream: