KVELDSSANGER

Already, with Ulver's 2nd album, it was apparent that this band was going to be full of surprises with each album. Many people lump Ulver's first 3 albums together saying that it was their black metal trilogy. To me, I don't think you can lump any of Ulver's albums together because each one is so different. Where the first album was black metal but with medieval style singing in many places throughout, this one is all acoustic with Gregorian type chanting in about half of the songs and just instrumental in the others. The third album in this so called trilogy is really noisy and heavy and also the least accessible of the three albums, but it is still quite different from anything else the band has done, even from the first album. But I won't go into detail about that album here since this is about the 2nd album.

Like I said, it is all acoustic and very peaceful, yet still dark and eerie sounding. The vocals do have some variance in them, but they all follow a chanting style and sound like a group of monks singing along with the beautiful guitar and occasional violin. There really isn't a lot of variety between the songs, but some of them are heartbreakingly beautiful. It would be hard to go through each track and break them down because every description would pretty much say about the same thing. But, strangely enough, this never gets boring because the arrangements are diverse enough to keep one's interest, and the album only lasts 35 minutes, so it doesn't really wear out it's welcome. Most of the tracks stay quite short, with only 3 going over 3 minutes (just barely except for the last track which goes for 6 minutes).

These are mostly quite lovely tunes if you don't mind the chanting part. My wife tells me that I must be going Catholic when I listen to this, so that gives you an idea of how authentic it sounds. But it is still quite an enjoyable album, and if you are listening to the discography in order, then it's a nice break between the two loud albums that come before and after this one. My preferred play list from these three albums would be to intersperse them sort of randomly to give it a little more variety.

So, it's pretty good and I can easily bump it up from 3.5 stars to round it off to 4. A little more variety would have been good, but may have sounded out of place, so there ya go.

By the way, lovers of folk music would probably enjoy this album too.