Vreid – V (2011)

One of the best parts about writing about music for so many years is to be able to see the progression of musical genres and bands. Because of this, we can safely say that Vreid has set a new bar for creative experimentation with Black Metal. While the band maintains its raw power and aggression, they also focus on the melodic aspect of their music by infusing elements from Hard Rock and Heavy Metal.

In “V”, the band goes beyond the traditional Black’n’Roll and creates something with so much more depth that will surely puzzle a bunch of people at first. But once you start peeling the layers out of this album, you will unravel a modern wonder in terms of musical creativity.

With the opening track “Arche”, the band creates a monumental assault of powerful riffs and crushing mid-Black Metal vocals (style has changed a bit from the last album). While this track maintains a straightforward Melodic BM approach, you can start noticing the little subtle hints of other genres that will emerge through the rest of this release. The melodic aspects of songs like “The Blood Eagle” and “Wolverine Bastards” combined with band’s powerful Black’n’Roll riffs make for very interesting songs.

In what it seems a very straight forward song, “The Sound of the River” quickly explodes into full-on melodic brilliance after the two minute mark, and the clean vocals will surely make some people’s Black Metal hearts stop. While this might sound a bit off, especially after the aggressive and powerful first few tracks, it makes the track be completely masterful, the weeping guitars paired with the harsh and clean vocals is just brilliant.

If you are looking for straight forward Black’n’Roll stuff, check out “Fire on the Mountain”. If you want some creative Black Metal with tremolo picking, checkout “The Other and the Look”, while this song might appear as your run-of-the-mill Black Metal track, after a few careful listens it will start developing into something more complex that that. Our favorite songs have to be “Slave”, a very melancholic piece that will even make you forget you are listening to Vreid, and the closing opus “Then We Die”, a brilliant song that nicely summarizes everything the band presents in this action packed release.

We believe we are hard people to impress, but with “V”, the band blew us away. The quality and maturity of this release is excellent and surely fans of intelligent and evolving Black Metal will enjoy this album to the max. If you are looking for something well crafted and different, Vreid will not disappoint you with this great release.

Release: March 15th, 2011

Country: Norway