Reviewed - 08/20/05

Blood Inside
[Jester Records]

Ulver have certainly come a long way since "Bergtatt," eh?

One of the seminal Nordic black metal bands, Ulver is responsible for three of the most respected old-school black metal albums in Scandinavian musical history. "Nattens Madrigal" in particular is a required addition to the collection of anyone daring to call themselves a black metal fan. But scarcely two years later, main Ulver persona Garm had changed his stage name to 'Trickster G' and all but turned his back on extreme metal. One of the musicians responsible for one of the greatest black metal albums of the 1990's now refused to provide any sort of harsh vocal utterances (before G left the group, Arcturus had to borrow Emperor's Ihsahn for one song on "The Sham Mirrors"). From black metal Ulver turned to dark industrial, and eventually took a plunge head-first into the realm of pure electronica and ambient. "Blood Inside" is one of the first Ulver releases in the past half decade to feature vocals.

Can a band travel from tr00 to avant garde and then return intact? The latest Ulver album is certainly not going to win back any of their old-school fans, but is nonetheless a homecoming of sorts.

That's not to say things are anything but out there, of course. For a while, listening to "Blood Inside," I was at a loss in terms of understanding it. I had no basis from which to judge it, no firm ground upon which to stand while observing the latest Ulver opus. But after a while, it dawned on me: Radiohead. "Blood Inside" features the same electronica-influenced dark, atmospheric alternative rock sound as "OK Computer" or "Kid A." Granted, Kristoffer Rygg (the artist formerly known as Garm) sounds nothing like Thom Yorke. But Ulver circa 2005 have that certain post-modern technological avant garde style. And while Ulver truly bear a resemblance to no one, it's nice to be able to call up at least one familiar name when attempting to describe these Norwegian's latest sonic chaos.

"Blood Inside" is much more ambient than "Perdition City," the last true studio album by Rygg and the clan. But at the same time, it is more abrasive than either that or "Themes from William Blake's 'The Marriage of Heaven & Hell'" (a personal favorite, I must admit). That's not to say "Blood Inside" bears any sort of resemblance to Ulver's black metal trinity… in fact, you would have to tie me down and torture me to get me to call "Blood Inside" metal. This is avant garde rock with both modernist and post-modernist influences. Plain and simple.

Repetitive electronic textures weave themselves into and out of "Blood Inside," commingled with dark soundscapes, hard-edged drum n' bass, and the Trickster's ever-recognizable crooning. Melody is omnipresent, but seldom catchy; only in a hand-full of tracks, such as "Christmas," are melodically memorable after the fact. There are huge amounts of percussion, both synthetic and analog, and run the spectrum from snare and bass to triangle and the indescribable. Songs like "Blinded by Blood" show that Ulver has not completely abandoned the ambience of their last few EPs and soundtracks, but more often than not this is an album that could fit in between the aforementioned "Nattens Madrigal" and "Themes from William Blake." It is very electronic and very dark, yet harsher and heavier than Ulver have been for quite some time.

"It is Not Sound" incorporates more than a little bit of Bach in it, in true post-modern fashion. Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet, supplies the words to "Christmas." "The Truth" invokes ghosts sprung from Björk's recent experimental masterpiece "Medulla." "Operator" is almost brutal, in an alt-rock sort of way. And more than half a dozen guest voices and instruments appear throughout "Blood Inside," although I cannot claim to recognize any of them.

And one last comment that must be made: after this album, I will never hear a cell phone ringing the same way again.

Avant garde can be a tricky mistress, however… there is a fine line between being experimental and being elitist. And Ulver have always had a tendency of courting the latter more than the former. Personally, I love it when my music goes cerebral, but I can imagine many other music fans not having time for pretentious music such as this. More than once, Ulver give the impression of being weird not in order to accomplish something specific, but merely for the sake of being weird. And to be totally honest, "Blood Inside" lost a moderate chunk of respect once I realized that Ulver were doing what Radiohead had done several years previous, albeit in a different form. I do believe that "Blood Inside" appeals to me more than any Radiohead that I have heard (and I've heard most of that group's material), but if being experimental implies doing what no one else has done before, Ulver's latest ever-so-slightly misses the mark.

Nonetheless, "Blood Inside" poses a fascinating listening experience for the open-minded music intellectual out there. It is amazingly intriguing based on its variety of sonic textures alone. And while the assembly of those textures might not be wholly unique, it is certainly unlike almost anything else existing in all of music, let alone heavy metal and its descendents. Ulver have always played the game according to their own rules, much to the chagrin of those who fell in love with this group early on. And there is nothing to be done for those who prefer to play different games. But for many – myself included – Ulver's "Blood Inside" is simultaneously two steps forward and one step backwards. And when it all comes down to it, that is good enough for me.