Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio – Make love and war: the wedlock of roses

After the leaving of Chelsea Krook, Ordo Equilibrio added Rosarius to its name and released this fourth album. The new bandmember is called Rose-Marie Larsen, but her musical contributions seem to be minimal so far. Tomas Petterson though delivered with this album a wonderful release. The well-known ritual, repetitive Ordo style is here, the long songtitles, some nice fetishy pix in the booklet and the usual themes are present: “I long to find Utopia my fatherland unsung / where girls in corsetry prevail beneath the sun”. As far as the quality of the songs is concerned, I find this one of their best albums so far, with great songs like ‘Ashen like love..’ and the hypnotizing ‘Hunting for the Black September’. Another great track is ‘Liebe Utopia…”, which stands out a bit, because it is much more militant and harsher than the rest. Futher this is a relatively calm album, with a lot of acoustic guitars and slow, ritual drumming, over which Tomas declamates his original views. A small point of criticism: the album lasts only 38 minutes, and contains 7 real songs, if you leave out the irritating intro and the boring outro. But quality above quantity, we shall say.