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Rating: The Ulver are the living proof that music has neither boundaries nor genres.
They started as a Black Metal band and after producing one of the genre’s most “rotten” albums (Nattens Madrigal), they “went mad” and turned to experimental electronics. After a transitional album (the endless Marriage Of Heaven and Hell) and an interim one (the EP Metamorphosis), they released the incredible Perdition City. And it's a true Black Metal album without the “mosquito” guitars (now I'm ducking to avoid insults).
Ok, the statement is quite provocative, but listening to this Perdition City at night, maybe on a rainy evening, generates in me the same feelings of disorientation, cold, chill that listening to black icons like Darkthrone, Emperor, Burzum and company provokes... On the other hand, the Ulver have proven capable of creating dark atmospheres like few others, and the two subsequent soundtrack albums are there to prove it. Thus, this Perdition City highlights on its cover, as if to make this ability of theirs evident, “music to an interior film”.
Thus we find ourselves, reluctantly, protagonists of this feature film of darkness, this journey into the city of eternal damnation (Perdition=Hell=Inferno), with no escape, no future, only anguish.
To greet us in the city of the damned is the icy sax of “Lost in moments”, perhaps the best track on the album, able to immediately extinguish any hope about what our fate will be by the end of our stay in Perdition City. The following tracks continue to take us to the darkest corners of the city and of our self until the electronic apocalypse of “The future sound of music”, a true hell of sounds and machinery. Here the album could end, the hell has captured the listener/protagonist, sucking their soul. The end, the curtain falls.
But the Ulver overdo it, and offer us 4 more tracks a bit out of line with what has been outlined so far, consisting of pure experimentation, distortions and electronic crackles, mixed and crossed samples in a sonic pandemonium. There's still room for a good “Catalept”. The brighter “Nowhere/Catastrophe” closes it. Have the Ulver with this track wanted to leave a bit of hope for the listener by proposing this sort of more rosy alternative ending?
In conclusion, Perdition City is a one-way journey into the darkest recesses of our being, a journey that for me ends with track 5.
Ah! Last advice given by Ulver themselves on the back cover: Headphones and darkness recommended. And let there be darkness...
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
01 Lost in Moments (07:17)
What's the meaning of this voyage?
To talk in a dream
So many bends and these years we've been together passed
And all this time she was tremendously excited
About everything she saw
Everything we had talked about
Every detail of every moment that had passed
Ready
One, two
09 Nowhere/Catastrophe (04:50)
You fly, or rather float, drift
Through an enormous dark room
A room of noises
Endless shimmering glissandi
Crackling pizzicato
Coal black, turbulence holes of bass drones
But otherwise empty
No planets, no meteorites
If anything, perhaps fine dust clouds of exploded music
You float there, somewhere between pleasure and fear
Nowhere - Catastrophe (x4)
In a piece of time you can't determine
You're everywhere but in the present
Hey you disappear further and further
Into these incalculable rooms
And your personality fades away
Your features evaporate, your body decomposes
And your last thought is that you have become a noise
A thin, nameless noise among all the others
Howling in the empty dark room
Nowhere - Catastrophe (x8)
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