ULVER - Shadows Of The Sun

A cross and a delight for anyone trying to write about music in terms of genres and classifications, the ever more indefinable Ulver return among us with yet another metamorphosis of a journey that began in '94 as an adventure firmly rooted in the Norwegian black-metal scene, and which has since relentlessly explored territories far removed from those origins. Not one of their albums has ever even remotely resembled the one before it. Their back catalogue includes works of archaic, pure and contemplative folk (the magnificent "Kveldssanger", from 1995), as well as experiments in glitch electronics (the presence of Fennesz on this album is no coincidence) and trip-hop (the thrilling "Perdition City", 2000), right through to the deconstructed prog of the most recent "Blood Inside" (2005).

So what does the trio led by Kris "Garm" Rygg put on stage this time? First and foremost, an unbroken, wisely brief flow of hypnotic, creeping, atmospheric music that borders on the impalpable. The exact opposite, in other words, of the schizophrenic chaos that animated their previous work. The album is almost entirely devoid of rhythmic interventions; the stage belongs entirely to Rygg's wonderful voice and to instrumental landscapes as refined as they are ethereal. Echoes of Coil (who were a decisive revelation along the band's path), Sylvian, and Radiohead — the Radiohead of the most introspective moments of "Kid A/Amnesiac" — chase each other through the dreamlike structures of the nine movements (calling them songs seems misleading) that make up this dark and entrancing sonic eclipse.

The first three tracks in particular form a single arc of mounting, rapt wonder. "Eos", rarefied, a wondrous masterpiece floating between tremors of strings and organ, with voices migrating weightlessly into the spectral stillness of "All The Love", interrupted by the first of the album's few drum interventions, and then sent soaring toward a stellar crescendo, gracefully crowded with piano, trumpet and xylophone, immediately swallowed up by the chamber-music watercolour of "Like Music".

The electronic treatments of guest of honour Fennesz instead guide the extraordinary "Vigil", which is also the most dreamlike and melodic moment of the record. Here the ideas perhaps come into sharper focus. We find ourselves within Ulver's so-called "pop" album, their most accessible, humble and intimate work. Ultimately, their most sincere and inspired work in many years. We are inside their own, Sigur Rós-like parenthesis, in the presence of a band that is mature and strengthened by its own absolute creative and compositional freedom.

The greatness of a band that escapes any genre definition is fulfilled once again in the heart of the chiaroscuro that gives the album its fragile yet perfect shape. There is no way to define the incredible cover of "Solitude", the Black Sabbath classic rendered by Ulver in a nocturnal, jazzy version that takes your breath away. Nor can displays of astral beauty like the title track be confined to a genre label, introduced by a funereal harmonium drone and then left free to reach the loftiest heights, flooded with light — light from which the epic, enchanted tumult of "Let The Children Go" takes shape. Ecstasy in the face of the Apocalypse.

Then, after the increasingly whispered and impalpable "Funebre", marked by the cries of the theremin (played by fellow Tzadik artist Pamelia Kurstin), "What Happened" closes the circle by returning to the string theme of "Eos". And it fades out in a slow, inconsolable awakening, into blackness and silence. At the end of this brief, alien, autumnal dream set to music, there is room for nothing but silence.

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14/10/2007