3/8/2024 0 Comments Heady definition city at duskRegardless of what measure we use to parse Ulver as a whole and their role within the music of their peers and the spaces they occupied, it is here on Perdition City that they transformed themselves from a black metal band into a Great Band, the same way other figures like The Cure, David Bowie, Coil or Pink Floyd had eruptive moments that dislodged them from the simpler schemas of genre and history into a much broader and more expansive figure. Should it model the world in repeatable processes and be able to parse the past? Should it inspire us toward one of many temporary homeostatic planes, these quivering and doomed-to-change ever-evolving states of being, be it sociological or otherwise? This isn’t meant to blow out the importance of the questions of genre or where we draw those lines as much as to display how fundamentally unanswerable this question is even as we dissolve it to baser and baser forms we are left, inevitably, with a quantum state, that both are true at once, producing differing but ultimately parallel and non-competitive sets of responses to the same question. These tensions within the notion of what makes a genre, whether it is taxonomic and musicological or spiritual and psychological, are mirrors to the greatest intellectual schism of 19th and 20th century philosophy, that between the analytic and continental schools, itself rooted in a deeper schism rooting back to what the role of philosophy is even supposed to be. This is one of the greatest elements it inherits from punk, a term that even in its earliest days bounded groups of radically different musical approaches such as Talking Heads, Blondie, and Ramones-all of whom shared the stage at CBGB-by uniting the impulse that drove them to make their music. And the precise moment this became clear was on Perdition City.īlack metal is a curious thing it is as much a musical style, one that can be defined and examined on a musicological level, as it is a spiritualism, a methodology, a mindset. But by this definition of black metal, the embrace of the figure of Satan the first rebel and overthrower of the law, that which overthrows even the self-law and the image of the idealized self, there is perhaps no band more black metal than Ulver, even if Ulver themselves would be the first to reject this sentiment. We can see this rubric mirrored as well in each of the other primary figured of the earliest days of black metal in Norway, from Darkthrone’s increasingly idiosyncratic counterrevolution into more and more archaic historical forms of metal, Mayhem’s spiral through the realms of the avant-garde in the wake of releasing perhaps the most quintessential second-wave black metal record of all time, and Enslaved’s development into a musically unbounded modern answer to Pink Floyd. He has done lifelong work to keep his work tied to the fracturing worlds of black metal even as the shape of his solo material enters often the orbit of progressive music, arena rock, and synth pop. Ihsahn, lead creative voice of foundational second-wave black metal trio Emperor and erstwhile solo artist since, has long held that black metal is a methodology and spirit rather than a specific sound, one marked by being a fearless iconoclast as much against yourself as for yourself, as much against your own underground audience as the mainstream world that surrounds you. There is another definition, of course, by which they have never left that umbrella. Ulver hasn’t been a black metal band, at least by one definition, since 1998. The albums are all over the map-albums we know and love, albums we like but from artists we don’t know that much about, and some that represent an entirely new avenue of exploration for us. Every few weeks, we will dive deep into albums that, by and large, have yet to be canonized. Give the People What They Want is a recurring feature and editorial experiment in which Treble explores individual albums as suggested by Patreon supporters.
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