Ulver — Blood Inside

A lifetime to endure the illness, the three men clad in white salute you with their scary instruments to instill fear on your mortal souls promising to heal you via the megalomaniac sounds of Ulver’s fifth full-length album: Blood Inside.

As promised by the band's spokesman in the interview on the Lyckantropen DVD, the album is bombastic and having more lyrics, almost all original this time, than for a long time. Times of minimal glitch and clicks ‘n’ cuts are behind them although you can still hear echoes of that period. Just like there are faint memories of The Marriage Between Heaven And Hell and Perdition City resounding in the almost impenetratable wall of sound that is created here. On first listen I was quite overwhelmed by it actually. So many things happen while all is buried under a thick layer of reverb and effects. The key, I found out in a few more spins, was to not try and catch all details that their previous works seem to revolve about. It’s better to have yourself being engulfed in the waves of sound, immerse oneself in the whirling spectacle that the Blood Inside actually represents.

This description might lead you to the conclusion that this album may lack dynamics, but that’s not the case. The sea can be calm like in Dressed In Black or the mild breeze of Blinded By Blood. Or the mysterious sounds of Your Call (with Maja Ratkje doing a great job as choir), things get a bit more stormy during It Is Not Sound (of which a video is included on the CD) as well as becoming a tsunami of heroic brass, cartoonlike keyboards and an insane guitarsolo (you can leave that to ex-Zappa guitarmagician Mike Keneally) in the closing track Operator. The lyrics are symbolic and many sentences have double meaning that you can ponder upon. Just like the music, which tends to perplex you in its density of musical events as well as the production.

My only complaint would be what seems to be the clipping of certain drumparts, surprising given the resumé of producer Ronan Chris Murphy which includes prog-icons like King Crimson and Yes. These bands do fit in with the sympho-leanings of some parts of this album. Like I suggested earlier, it all becomes a bit of a blur at times but my idea is that it’s a manifestation of what the band advocates in the booklet: “Viva Megalomania!”, where the listener may feel blinded by the abundance of light.

Ulver continue to keep their listeners fascinated with each twist and turn in their catalogue. We have something to chew on for a while, that’s for sure and the band claims to be reorganizing in a labyrinth outside Caïro.