![]() ![]() Southern Gothic has all the steely swing of New Order at their most lush, and sets down a tenet as Kristoffer Rygg, a highly expressive and underrated singer, tells us “I want to tell you something, about the grace of faded things.” Names, events, numbers, and dates are important constituent parts of this remarkable record’s story, and the song 1969 contends that “Nothing has changed since the late sixties”, the present is held by links to the past. 1969 transposes the power chord to the synthesiser and the result is as powerful as anything you will hear wrought out of an electric guitar, more so because it is so unexpected. ![]() Or, to put it another way, if the Pet Shop Boys had started life decades ago as a black metal band they might have made this record right now.Ī few observations: Rolling Stone…well…rolls, with the hipswaying seductive moves of the slinkiest M People groove, led by Sisi Sumbundu’s soulful voice. The Assassination of Julius Caesar has been described by Kristoffer Rygg as Ulver’s “pop album”, but this is the kind of dark and intelligent pop one might have found on Factory Records before it got silly, or 4AD or ZTT in those wilfully esoteric record labels’ far off heyday. ![]() Do they always change or, as hinted at by a theme from this new album, do they stay the same but the ground beneath them is continually shifting? Who knows, not least the band themselves, but the recorded results of this continued exploration are always compelling, and as we are talking about Ulver, unlike another implied message on The Assassination of Julius Caesar, history is not always doomed to repeat itself. They are a progressive band in the real sense, and no two albums are the same. Like some bizarre experiment in musical quantum mechanics, Ulver seem to exist in several places at once. It would be easy to say of any new release from Norwegian sonic pioneers Ulver “Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting!”, but I have long come to realise that it is far easier to leave all expectations at the door where this questing band are concerned whenever their latest offering lands on my virtual doormat. ![]()
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