ULVER - Blood Inside

Whatever was going on, it was some pretty freaked-out shit.

lyrics on shadows ruined it for me. are they any better on blood inside?

They work well with the music. Much more confrontational and apocalyptic than on SOTS, they're also pleasantly abstract enough as to produce impression rather than awkward definition.

yeah, i did actually sort of notice the pedestrian lyrics on 'shadows...'. well it's obviously a mood piece, so i don't really mind that the lyrics are merely suggestive of something rather than outright poignant and cutting. the lyrics i think, are effective as a minor contributing force in establishing an overall premise, that is mostly captured in the creatively subtle ebbs and shifts in the music, as well as the uniformity in tone and feel of the record as a whole.

i've been really, totally digging 'shadows...' just recently. i never really envisaged it as an album that would one day kick me up the ass all of a sudden. i thought of it as an album i'd always have a heady, distant fondness for, admiring it more as a thematic, cohesive construct than something with individual moments of awe. but now i can really pick up on the peaks lurking within the songs themselves.

It's a really subtle record; the construction of the songs is ingenious, and there's SO much more going on than first meets the eye. I don't rate it as highly as BI, mostly because it isn't quite so blindingly expressive, so devastatingly visceral, but it's arguably as impressive an achievement.

Doesn't help SOTS that BI is still my album of the decade, either

Someone please help me decode this album. The production is not what I expected, on first listen. It sounds ghostly, understated. Like it was recorded in a cathedral or a graveyard, or both. Not sure what to make of the songs yet, either.

omg

I think the key is in the Bach Toccata & Fugue interpretation at the end of It Is Not Sound. Fragility of music. Interconnectedness. Music as gnostic lore. The truth is in the art. Think of it as a Bible reading in sound, aware of all cultures including the present one.

It is compact, but takes its sweet time. Never rushed, yet always rushing towards its next rhetorical anguish. It has a cumulative momentum and is very much of a piece.

It is ancient text, but it is forever downloading its own updates. Synthesisers. Post-production. Multiplicity of voices.

Take "Dressed In Black". It starts with two notes, sliding into each other. It builds, with instrumentation state-of-the-art AND traditional, until reaching a musical resolution midway through. It then continues into the abyss opened by this elegant synchronicity of timbres, this resolution. It grows steadily more insistent (while never quite chaotic), until it can grow no more, and then ends, showstoppingly, with a whole succession of careening, descending notes. The calm, untrue start has been usurped by a genuine musical force, a reality. It shakes the complacency from the very sound.

Think of the album as providing these unlikely resolutions, and using the fact that it has demonstrated these resolutions to be possible as a means to fully inhabit their space, to plunge deeper. To rip open the wormhole and then to fly fearlessly into it. This happens on almost every song. A matrix of multiplied voices based in timeless musical lore, that turns on itself and reveals truths that other bands cannot touch. Ulver do not merely read from the Bible, they translate and embellish it. They impose their own truth on the sounds given to them by others.

If it sounds ghostly, it is because Ulver are not interested in making it easy or obvious for you. Scott Seward said it best when he placed this record in the same bracket as Talk Talk's last two albums. In a slightly more manic, technologically-attuned way, Blood Inside is brethren with those most wondrous of records.

"It Is Not Sound" builds from, again, a harsh, modern, unplaceable electronic drone-noise into a fully-fleshed, accelerating composition, which after a linear and exhausting build (a real experience, a genuine discovery) finds resolution in one chord, which is itself the first chord of Bach's Toccata & Fugue. The musical wormhole opens, and a succession of increasingly space-age, alienating synths hammer out the lore of a different time. Ulver have built a terrifying truth and then they have embellished it with a quote. They have found truth and they have pressed deeper still. Everything is connected.

This is the most important record of our young millennium.

Sounds like I need to give this another listen, then. :)

Louis, compile a top 10 or 20 list of your fave albums from the 00's,90's, 80's ,70's and 60's and do a poll on each of them.
(then you could take the top 2 on each and have an overall poll at the end!)

You know you wanna do it.

That's a thought, although it'd be very self-centred and would draw attention not exclusively positive. Maybe if I become a notable critic, or something. Also, I am positive I have not heard enough 60's music to cover that decade adequately.

Anyone with an interest in music as art owes it to themselves to hear this record.

go on and do it. You know you want to.

It's a great idea, do it Country Matters!

Thirded.

He's too scared about what others might think.

No, I'm scared of seeming attention-seeking! I might post some lists here and see what the vibe is...

do a poll you coward, it's hardly attention seeking if you've been put up to it by at least 3 people.

at least if you do it there would be posts and votes. Ive been around a lot longer than you but i assure you,if I did it, id get you guys posting at the most.

lol i think your poll should just have two options: doom metal and long-form acid funk

;-)

i think you know fine well i listen to a lot of different stuff

Test Match Special

Did this poll ever happen?

I'm listening to Shadows now, and checking out some Ulver threads. Becoming one of my bigger recent discoveries

No it would have been too self-indulgent. I'm keen for an ILM-wide 00's poll. I'd be giving this album some points

It is remarkable how well Ulver has aged and also the cross-over appeal they had, especially compared to same-generation bands.
It's a slightly nostalgic remark, as I was also a massive Arcturus fanboy at the time, as well as into other cool Norwegian projects like Manes (Vilosophe is quite close to BI), In the Woods..., Solefald (and elsewhere, of course maudlin of the Well / Kayo Dot). At the time it was perfectly logical.
People complain about the vocals, but I think La Masquerade Infernale is an original blueprint for Garm's rock-electronic ambitions (just listen to the first two tracks), right before Themes (which blew my mind and has forever special status, and maybe their top eccentricity).

Anyway, 2 years before Blood Inside:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gg8zAoeNmI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_-uvdAv0xw

I should give Themes from... another try one day, I used to have it and decided it was horribly incoherent and flabby compared to bands like Arcturus (who I still have a big soft spot for) but not as convincingly loopy as 666 International (ditto)

it is incoherent and flabby but it is also legitimately batshit. i don't like it so much but you can't deny it's unique

Incoherent I get, but flabby ? If anything, and despite all the interludes, it's very focused and they take themselves very much too seriously. It's like a strange and dark industrial rock opera mixed with ambient and folk. Maybe you mean linear. But many songs either hit pretty hard, are trance-like and/or feature monstrous basslines. The Argument, A Memorable Fancy 6-7, Proverbs of Hell, Plates 12-13, Memorable Fancy 17-20, plates 21-22, Memorable Fancy 22-24 and others immediately before or after (I just mentioned the whole album). And it sounds utterly deranged / out of this world. I like to think old Blake would have been pleased. And like, who does that ? The text is easily 20 pages. I've listened to the album so much that it just seems a cool addition that it's Blake.

is there any way to listen to Nattens Madrigal without giving yourself massive tinnitus afterwards

xps it's been a while since I've heard it tbf I just remember thinking of it that way. What I should do is try to re-evaluate all the stuff I didn't like back in the day and see if I feel any different now my tastes have changed a bit. I was never into anything between Nattens Madrigal and Blood Inside.

In answer to frogbs' question: not that I'm aware of...

Nattens is unlistenable of course, it's an army of jigsaws, but maybe at low volume on headphones.