Ulver’s next two releases, the EP Metamorphosis and full-length album Perdition City, were even more experimental and pensive than the Blake album. We are as unknown to you as we always were. If this discourages you in any way, please have the courtesy to refrain from voicing superficial remarks regarding our music and/or personae. We are proud of our former instincts, but wish to liken our association with said genre to that of the snake with Eve. We acknowledge the relation of part I & III of the Trilogie (Bergtatt & Nattens Madrigal) to this culture, but stress that these endeavours were written as stepping stones rather than conclusions. Ulver is obviously not a black metal band and does not wish to be stigmatized as such. It also ranked very high at many year's best polls that same year. For instance, it was reviewed as album of the month in several high-profile magazines such as Terrorizer, Metal Hammer, and Rock Hard.
Despite confounding and perhaps alienating many fans of the band’s first three albums, the album received widespread acclaim from critics within both the rock/metal and alternative music press. Lyrically, the album incorporates the entire text of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and relies on guest vocals. In this album, the musicians blended electronics, industrial music elements, progressive metal and avant-garde rock, adding ambient passages. Tore Ylwizaker, a new composer and sound architect, added to Garm's expanding artistic visions, and together they stepped over the boundaries of black metal aesthetics, creating a genre-defying work. Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, released in 1998, was different from what Ulver had made before. When questioned on this matter, Garm only affirmed that the band has expensive tastes. A lesser-known rumor is that the band purposely recorded the album on a four-track cassette recorder and used the money that Century Media gave them for other things, like Armani suits, haircuts, cocaine, beer, or a new car, or all of the above. There are rumors surrounding this album and its recording, the most famous being that the band recorded this album in a forest, something which Garm has repeatedly denied. The album is intentionally underproduced, akin to Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger, with buzzing guitars and rather muffled drums. Unlike on Bergtatt, however, the only acoustic instruments appear in a brief interlude in the first track. The third album, Nattens madrigal (Madrigal of the Night), saw the band returning to a black metal style similar to Bergtatt. Garm has since remarked that Kveldssanger was an "immature attempt at making a classical album", later adding that the performance was immature, yet the content is strong when their youth at the time is taken into account. Kveldssanger, Ulver's second album, contrasts with Bergtatt as it uses classical guitars, cello and chamber chants, completely eschewing the metal elements of Bergtatt, while still having a folk theme. Bergtatt features a melancholic, fully acoustic song "Een stemme locker" (A Voice Beckons). The subtitle translates as "A Tale in 5 Chapters". The narrative of the album's lyrics follows a maiden as she becomes so mountain-taken. The title Bergtatt translates as "taken by the mountains" in Norwegian folklore the word refers to people who wander off into mountains, lured by trolls or other mythic creatures. The album Bergtatt – Et eeventyr i 5 capitler is placed in the folk-themed black metal genre for its occasionally fast tempo, distorted electric guitars and croaky screaming vocals intermitted with melodious acoustic passages with singing, and for having a fantasy storyline. The themes of the lyrics were greatly influenced by Scandinavian folktales. The archaic Dano-Norwegian lyrics were inspired by Baroque poets such as Ludvig Holberg and the hymn-writer Thomas Kingo. Since their first, folklore-influenced black metal release entitled Bergtatt – Et eeventyr i 5 capitler (1994), Ulver’s musical style has been fluid and increasingly eclectic, blending genres such as rock, electronica, symphonic and chamber traditions, noise and experimental music into their oeuvre, but with a heavy reliance on electronic recording techniques.Īlthough Ulver's first three albums are often called their “Black Metal Trilogie”, they are quite different in style, with only two of them belonging at all to the black metal genre. Ulver (Norwegian for wolves) is a music band from Norway.
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