Ulver - Flowers of Evil (2020) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

In the midst of the forest, the floor is littered with monstrous heads and mythical figures, frozen in torturous combat or threatened by wild beasts. A dragon fights a dog and a wolf. A lion sinks its teeth into the fire-breathing monster’s chest.

This sacred grove, near Bomarzo in Lazio, Italy, reveals the nightmare vision of Vicino Orsini, a sixteenth century nobleman. It’s a forest of symbols, suggesting a civilisation overrun by the beasts, demons and monsters of the primordial world. Soon after Orsini’s death, trees began to close in on these many peculiar beings, and green moss would eventually seize them. Slowly, nature finished what he had started.

Flowers of Evil, the new studio album from Ulver, finds the wolf pack exploring the fear and wonder of mankind’s fall from redemption. Visions similar to those of Orsini come to mind, as untamed life abounds:

THEY SPREAD
TWIST AND TURN
IN THE KILLING FIELDS

The threads of haunted places and images entwine. Have Ulver discovered new pastures under the sun? Or scoured the ruins of their own moonlit past? The truth is, they’re closer to their previous purlieu than perhaps ever before.

“Doom dance”, someone dubbed their last studio album, the critically acclaimed, Impala Award-winning The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2017). Flowers of Evil comes across as an unfeigned progression along the course set by that album, revealing a band moving deeper into beats and grooves, hooks and choruses, synths and guitars, yet sounding more stripped back, making room for the distinctive detail. Once again Michael Rendall (The Orb) and legendary producer Martin “Youth” Glover have taken crystalline care of the mix.

As Caesar demonstrated, Ulver haven’t abandoned any of their obsessions, worries or nightmares as they enter the gilded palace of pop. “One last dance / in this burning church”, Kristoffer Rygg announces on the album’s opening track, featuring old friend Christian Fennesz on guitar and electronics. It sees them locked inside their Hall of Mirrors. A slow build brings the music to the album’s pulsing theme:

WE ARE WOLVES
UNDER THE MOON
THIS IS OUR SONG
WE HAVE LOVED
AND WE HAVE LOST
WE ARE READY TO GO

With Flowers of Evil Ulver have fled a burning Rome, only to confront further crime and corruption. ‘Russian Doll’, the album’s first single, moves determinedly through the night, with a story of unfolding tragedy and misery. ‘Machine Guns and Peacock Feathers’ brings fiery end-time imagery – “barrels are burning / great art will be destroyed” – with a disco beat and flashy ’80s synths. Dismal cries resound on ‘Hour of the Wolf’; echoing Bergman’s classic film, the song is dedicated to the hour between night and dawn, “when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real”. ‘Apocalypse 1993’ reveals Ulver at their catchiest, its bounding-goat groove running hand in hand with a grand chorus depicting the catastrophic events at Waco, Texas, during the winter of that year – the very same winter that saw the birth of Ulver’s first incarnation. From that thorny undergrowth, this is what they have become: an eclectic, many-headed beast, chanting the ecstasies of the spirit and the senses.

Flowers of Evil unfolds with the shattering second single, ‘Little Boy’. A mysterious beat moves the track towards its thunderous climax, and here Michael J. York’s ominous pipes melt into the softer, moodier ‘Nostalgia’, a ’70s soul shuffle, and the heart-breaking Talk Talk-esque balladry of ‘A Thousand Cuts’. Finally, the wolves are back in the palace of excess, waltzing the night away. Yet around them, the wilderness rises, triumphant; “grass will grow over your cities”, as the Bible says.

AllMusic Review by Thom Jurek
Ulver, Norway's most evolutionary band, are celebrating their 25th anniversary in 2020. They began as an extreme black metal project but have since followed a labyrinthian, experimental path through various genres, including electronic, industrial, and ambient musics. They've composed soundtracks and created art installations, and cut an unclassifiable album with Sunn O))). 2017's The Assassination of Julius Caesar was a "doom dance" offering that deliberately channeled early influences such as Depeche Mode and New Order, imprinted with Ulver's dark, romantic musical signature.

Flowers of Evil's release coincides with Ulver's anniversary and the simultaneous publication of Wolves Evolve: The Ulver Story, a fat autobiography with interviews and photographs. Though frontman Kristoffer "Garm" Rygg is the only original member, longtime keyboardist/programmer Tore Ylwizaker, lyricist Jørn H. Sværen, and arranger Ole Alexander Halstensgård all remain. Filling out the lineup are guitarist Stian Westerhus, drummer Ivar Thormodsæter, and percussionist/engineer Anders Møller. This outing sticks close to the sonic blueprint of the 2017 album; it too was co-produced by Michael Rendall (The Orb) and Youth (Martin Glover). Ulver double down on the apocalyptic dance rock of the record's predecessor, though this is more cinematic and propulsive. After an ambient electronic intro, opener "One Last Dance" (with guest guitarist Christian Fennesz) sounds like the industrial electronics of Human League before they became pop stars. Its lyrics are drenched in grief yet offer Ulver's manifesto: "We are wolves/This is our song/We're ready to go…." The single "Russian Doll" is a hooky yet melancholy pulsating doom disco lament; it equals transcendent first single "Nostalgia" as one of the most fractious yet danceable tunes the band have ever recorded. Dirty over-amped guitars add an anthemic quality to "Machine Guns and Peacock Feathers" as Garm depicts the warring self-destructive impulses that govern the 21st century. The jarring industrial dance music in "Hour of the Wolf" is illuminating for its chilling clarity; an elegiac acoustic piano adorns the drum and synth loops with warmth and emotion. "Apocalypse 1993" juxtaposes doom dance and electro in a morality tale about David Koresh and the Branch Davidian cult; the band actually sound like a drugged Talk Talk circa It's My Life. "Little Boy" weds darkwave to post-punk, and electro-pop to skeletal Detroit techno, all the while relating the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the mutant post-punk disco of the single "Nostalgia," the set closes with a pristine yet emotionally devastating "A Thousand Cuts." Throbbing bass lines ride alongside Rygg's smooth, silky vocal delivery as a distant violin sings to the drums and synths. The song's narrative, while open to interpretation, exists inside the polar opposites sorrowful and harrowing. The music on Flowers of Evil traverses with jarring effectiveness both past and future. Its songs explore grief, hysteria, madness, vulnerability, and romance as inseparable and indelible aspects of the human spirt, resulting in a masterwork of the familiar and the disorienting.

Tracklist:
1. One Last Dance (05:44)
2. Russian Doll (03:55)
3. Machine Guns and Peacock Feathers (03:55)
4. Hour of the Wolf (04:26)
5. Apocalypse 1993 (04:32)
6. Little Boy (05:23)
7. Nostalgia (05:21)
8. A Thousand Cuts (04:42)


Thanks to the Original customer!