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Features Disc of the day
Ulver
Shadows Of The Sun
(Jester, 2007)
Black metal's answer to Pink Floyd...
Melancholia has permeated heavy music from the beginning. Behind the bludgeon, there is a nihilism that extends far beyond the blues, and Black Sabbath's early work is packed with it. Even Paranoid, tossed off by the band in a matter of minutes during surplus studio time, reaches us now as if from a well of psychological anguish ("Finished with my woman / 'Cos she couldn't help me with my mind!" wails Ozzy). Solitude - from the Sabs' 1971 album, Master Of Reality - is grimmer still ("My name it means nothing / My fortune is less"), and is reinterpreted on this, the seventh studio album by Norway's most inspired avant-metal outfit.
In many respects, Ulver epitomise what happens when metal's melancholic strand is taken to its logical conclusion. While the band's roots lie in clattering black metal, their evolution began with the release of 1998's openly progressive Themes From William Blake's The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell. By the time they'd got to Shadows Of The Sun, they'd wandered still further away from their gnashing early work, sitting at the remote, windswept crossroads of art-rock, ambient adventurism, improvisational noise, and the hymnal aspects of modern classical music.
If you need more specific reference points then marvel as opener Eos plunges the listener into a world where it is possible to imagine mid-period Pink Floyd collaborating with a latter-day David Sylvian. The choral beauty of All The Love follows, a sanguine lament on the subject of fear, ignorance and the ignobility of conflict, while Like Music provides the listener with a sense of solace and redemption. Yet the scale of Ulver's true ambition is best illustrated on Let The Children Go, its celestial church feel liquefying into ECM-influenced noodle-soup with the use of ambient percussion and Mathias Eick's Jon Hassell-ish trumpet.
Meticulously assembled, Shadows Of The Sun is an album whose scope defies time and genre. It stands as a tenebrous testament to Ulver's unique vision.
Phil Alexander
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 15/10/2009
Further Listening
Ulver – Blood Inside (Jester, 2005)
David Sylvian – Blemish (Samadhi Sound, 2003)
Sunn O))) – Monoliths And Dimensions (Southern Lord, 2009)
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