Like the Ruthwell Cross depicted in the liner art, this album self-consciously teeters at the rubicon betwixt paganism and Christendom; an intentionally Abrahamic re-interpretation of viking black metal aesthetics. A rich, gloomy, atmospheric soundscape, dominated by grim riffage and one croaking vocalist.

Triumph and mockery, hatred and purity, perversion, violation, sadistic and pompous cruelty, occasional flashes of desperate heroics. Everything you want from an extreme metal record. Dark towers and piles of eviscerated bodies rise high in the subconscious as demons howl incessantly. The orcs of Mordor grin, yet the elves and humans among us will be leaping from their seats at those few defiant moments of heroism. A record for the ages. This is why Metal exists.

Absolutely sick debut. Proof that unblack just keeps getting better.

folksy depressive menace from the northwoods.

Cullen Toner's side-project that's arguably superior to his main band, Dawnbreaker. The wall of sound to end all walls of sound. Rarely do you feel so close to the abyss of light. Best listened to in a single evening.

A strange, thrashing amalgum of two bathory-style tracks.

Most of my criticisms center on production. This is a furious record, brutal, atmospheric, dogmatic.

One of the best symphonic death records you can spin, Christian or otherwise.

This is definitely an album. There are instruments. Being played. They make sounds. These sounds, ostensibly, form music. Welterwerk is self-consciously fractured. It spins like a piece of avante-garde surrealist fiction, or schizophrenia.

I think this album is unblack, but I'm not entirely sure. Regardless, this is a thick, murderous, foreboding atmosphere, reminiscent of some of the slower stuff by Satanic Warmaster.