Ulver — Kveldssanger — recorded 1995 (?), released 03/1995

Folkulver time! I’m gonna go ahead and get something out of my system: I don’t like the idea of folk music as a genre. I think it’s inadequate as a genre descriptor, as a descriptor of a characteristic that is supposedly shared by otherwise completely unrelated styles, and it translates a profoundly cosmopolitan and skewed approach to otherness in culture. I’m generalizing a bit, of course, but it feels like not much more than a more familiar, less ridiculous version of “world music” or something, you know? Anyways, this is not important to this review, I just wanted to rant for a bit. On to the album:

Kveldssanger, “twilight songs”, the second entry on what would later become known as Ulver’s Black Metal Trilogy, features no black metal at all. Why is that? I do not know.

The style of this opus as a whole consists of variations on two main elements: melancholic, somewhat over-repetitive guitar strumming, and baroque-sounding sections with cellos, flutes and whatnot, with the somewhat rare vocal section. The sung parts are about half chorals with many voices and half solo Garm, and to be perfectly honest I don’t really like his solo singing in here: it’s solemn and all, of course, but most of the time he sounds like he’s trying to sing a register or so too low, which makes his voice sound, hm, I think “stodgy” is the word? Almost like he has something stuck in his throat — a turd of canine provenance, for example.

The guitarin’ is pretty good I suppose, but I feel like there’s a lot of lost potential there. The production sounds pretty good to me, crisp and clear yet a lil rough where it needs to be, and I won’t try to comment on the songwriting, but I feel like they just go with the quality yet predictable melodies for too long, adding and subtracting little if anything at all. I yearn for a short, twinkly solo. The atmosphere in here, though, does absolutely destroy: these guys are masters of ambiance, and the melancholic mood is nigh impeccable, if a little flat at times.

It’s funny to think of Bergtatt as a sum of Kveldssanger’s folk and Nattens Madrigal’s black metal. Apart from the obvious fact that Bergtatt came before, I would also say that it is somewhat larger than the sum of its parts. The black metal and occasional rough sounding production in Nattens works pretty well, even if it’s considerably less dynamic and epic than Bergtatt, but if you do the opposite and leave just the chamber neofolk, well… It just doesn’t work that well for me.

I seriously wanted to like this, I really did. But ultimately there’s just so much stuff that I like better, both folk-y strummy guitar-wise and Ulver-wise, that Kveldssanger just ends up falling flat on its face. And that’s all I got to say.

DOES IT PULVERIZE? I uh eeeh hmmm I ermm eeegh mmm no.