“I want to tell you something about the grace of faded things,” he begins on ‘Southern Gothic’, a promise which he largely sticks to over the course of the album. These have been sorely missed the last time Ulver created an album of ‘real’ songs complete with sung verses and choruses was back in 2011 with War Of The Roses, an avant-garde epic heavily shaped by the presence of Sunn O)))’s Daniel O’Sullivan (who appears to have ended his tenure as a fully-fledged band member, contributing only a few additional guitars this time round).Ī lifetime of setting words by the likes of Fernando Pessoa, Christian Bök and William Blake to music has given Garm a real understanding of poetic structure, and much of the material he’s stored away through their latest instrumental phase is as much a pleasure to read as it is to listen to. There’s no dumbing down of the music here, just a rechannelling of the collective’s most overtly intellectual tendencies back into Garm’s lyrics. That’s not to say that Ulver have become the new Wham! overnight, although some of the results are oddly hilarious (‘So Falls The World’ sounds like Ulver’s take on Adele’s ‘Skyfall’).
There is still the odd occasion where the group can’t resist kicking up an atonal cacophony, but for the most part they remain committed to the experiment at hand. The usual Coil and Throbbing Gristle influences have taken a backseat to allow them to tick off every item on the Jacksons/Bee Gees/Neptunes checklist: there are stacked choruses of female-backed falsetto harmonies, warm pools of artificial strings, the Beatles and Stones-referencing ‘1969’ even has a couple of unabashed key changes thrown in for good measure. There’s no subversive angle here, no sardonic undercurrent, just 43 minutes’ worth of instantly familiar, emphatically accessible electronic tracks. The Depeche Mode bounce of lead single ‘Nemoralia’ was no one-off: Garm and the gang have cast off the perceived mantle of pretentiousness to produce a lush, uncynical pop record. Yet, nearly a quarter of a century after their inception, these predictably unpredictable chaps are quite capable of shocking everyone with an album like The Assassination of Julius Caesar. With Kristoffer Rygg (or Garm, as he is more often known) as their sole constant member, Ulver have, in turn, spent time as an orchestral folk group, a jazz-techno act, a minimalistic film scoring project, a freeform prog-rock collective, a sixties garage rock cover band and an ambient drone ensemble.
But while most of these acts' metamorphoses largely follow a linear progression from point A to point B via a transitory point C, Ulver have distinguished themselves by moving from point A to point Z via, not only the Latin alphabet, but the entire Greek, Cyrillic and Aramaic ones too. From Burzum to Borknagar, a disproportionately high number of ex-black metal bands have proved adept at absorbing and perfecting musical styles that are well removed from their brutal, noise-based roots.
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