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Ulvsblakk – Sorgen [EP]

ulvsblakk – sorgen [ep]

Info

The first thing we hear in Ulvsblakk’s “Sorgen” is the shudder of strings—not the pretentious washes and splashes of a chamber orchestra but the small tremor that portends a devastating illness. When the guitars of “Cairn” come in, we find ourselves lost and alone in the blue-black blur of a winter’s storm, being pelted—shelled, even—with ice. Lumbering figures emerge from the curtains of ice, each carrying … what are they carrying? In a flash, the screaming begins: on your back in the snow, flesh shorn, you find these cave creatures hammering out arrowheads from your fingertips with massive blocks of ice, cutting runes into your femur, pulling out ribs for—well, just for kicks, really. And then: they stop. There is a moment of lilting nylon guitar. It’s over, you think—and maybe someone will find you. Maybe you will survive. Babe, you thought wrong: the riff comes back now slower and heavier, as they drill into your ears with shards of your own ribcage. The final minutes of the track are immersive, jagged guitar tones as what remains of you ceases to writhe as flesh begins sticking fast to the ice and you await the solstice of your coming season of nothingness. And yeah: that’s just the first track.

The B-side, “Hun Farer Landet Rundt”, begins with an almost flamenco tremolo and immediately transports you to a gypsy cave somewhere outside of Granada, hearing Andalusian dancers crushing stone under their percussive dancing. And it should be said the percussion in these tracks is incredibly expressive for the genre: while fully within the atmospherics of Black Metal, it’s the kind of expressivity you expect from jazz drummers like Max Roach or Philly Joe Jones. It’s a welcome departure from the monotonous smacking-on-the-box-your-refrigerator-came-in that we tend to hear in Black Metal (though to be fair, that’s a got a time and place, too).

The rolling simmer of the nylon guitar gives way to flies swarming rot and then to distortion that crackles and pops like the hair on a sacrificial goat thrown into the pyre. The riffs call to mind the ashen faces of a line of spectators as you make your walk from the cell to the guillotine: meeting human eyes with nothing identifiably human left in them, as they gaze upon the damned. The cymbal fills creak as you ascend the old wooden, blood-black steps and rattle as the gore- crusted machinery is prepared. The vocals come in furiously, like the sound of old rope ripping through the pulleys as the blade is released, and for a few seconds we can see the faces of children watching us, smiling and squirming to get a better view of the doomed man through whose neck the blade has not fully passed: he, making the kind of plangent screams that attend the breaking of the weld between spirit and substance. The screams are multi-tracked to just slightly overlap creating a feeling of delirium in which you don’t even hear the blade being pulled up before its final, successful descent. In a moment, there are no more screams. The distortion soaks the final minutes of the track, as cranial blood soaks the mouldering wicker basket, giving way to a razor-bladed rasgueado played for a dancer no longer dancing on this side of Stygian divide. (AJP)

Ulvsblakk

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