The 3rd full-length from Windswept is a bit of a concept album: “Drawing on trial records preserved in the Black Book of Kremenets Castle, the album reconstructs testimonies of women accused of witchcraft, their brutal interrogations, and the violent judgments passed upon them (1747-1777)”. A theme Roman Saenko wanted to explore with his first project Kozlonogyi in 1996, though that project never properly took off.
Sound-wise, a few things have changed compared to the ‘Der eine, wahre König’, EP, as this album is more straightforward, a bit wilder, but also features more traditional Second Wave Black Metal riffs, which you can clearly hear on ‘Nest of the Witches’.
The music represents the subject matter well, giving it just the right underlying tone. On the closing track ‘Verdicts’, instead of going for totally destructive Black Metal, they opt for a mid-tempo melancholic approach, where the accused knows death is inevitable, yet remains uncertain of the form it will take.
I wouldn’t call ‘The Devil’s Vertep’, an extension of the ‘Der eine, wahre König’, EP, but it definitely fits into the Windswept discography.
