77. Ulver - Perdition City (2000)
Tracklisting:
Lost in Moments
Porn Piece Or the Scars of Cold Kisses
Hallways of Always
Tomorrow Never Knows
The Future Sound of Music
We Are The Dead
Dead City Centres
Catalept
Nowhere/Catastrophe
In some ways I think you really have to get into Ulver from their very first album and go in chronological order to truly appreciate what a masterpiece
Perdition City is. I mean Ulver break into the black metal scene in 1994 with an impressive debut, then follow it up a year later with an entirely acoustic album. The band had then amazed us with an amazing black metal album worthy of following up their first. for their third album, then kind of fiddle around a bit with experimental metal for a fourth. Then just after you hear that Ulver have a new album coming out you think "oh gee what's the gimmick this time? A bluegrass album? *Smug laugh*".
You put on the headphones (because this is most definitely a headphones album) and instantly your ears are assaulted with... jazz? Electronic? Trip-Hop? I know! It's only now that you realize that Ulver really are one of those bands that are not barred by any limits and can take on any genre and walk away with an amazing album. And that's exactly what Ulver did on
Perdition City, they proved to us that they really are the real deal. A band you never have to worry about reading reviews before buying again. "What's that? An Ulver album is coming out this year! Oh well there's an album I'm going to get no matter what". No matter what... that's kind of a big deal now I think. I mean I'll acknowledge that any high profile band will always have people go out and buy their $13 pieces of crap, but for many bands now they don't have that same audience that is so willing to part with the money before even trying an illegal download. Ulver have buyer's confidence, and that is a rarity these days, because this is a case where the buyer's confidence was earned, not just earned with marketing up the arse.
First off, trying to classify this album is almost next to impossible. The genre fusions work so well and the band pulls it off so naturally if it was a word it would be a very long and hard to pronounce word. For the sake of argument though, it's a pretty save bet to say the album is largely electronic. At times it has some very sexy heavy downtempo trip-hop going on, especially in the song "Tomorrow Never Knows", whereas in others the sound is more jazz orientated, like "Lost in Moments".
The production work on
Perdition City is top notch, with every sound ringing through clearly, and with a nice pair of headphones you will really be able to absorb all the MANY sounds merging together. The album was produced by Ylwizaker and Audun Strype, who I had to look up on Wikipedia, but I haven't found anything else produced by them, but they did a killer job. I am not usually much of an audiophile, but this really is an album that has a noticeably high quality production.
My only big complaint about the album is that it doesn't really have any metal influences, except one part in "The Future Sound of Music", and even then it was metal-lite. I mean even their acoustic folk album still had a very similar feel to black metal, at least in atmosphere, but I really don't hear any metal influence on
Perdition City. That doesn't stop the album from being mindblowingly awesome, but just a tinsy bit would have made it better.
Overall this is an album unlike no other and it's incredibly accessible to just about anybody. So if you like electronic music (which is pretty much all of us) you owe it to yourself to listen to this album.