Ulver – Childhood's End

May 28, 2012 • Kscope

Either Ulver has transcended all of space-time or they've totally lost it; I'm not sure which. It seemed like they could do no wrong after releasing some of the greatest albums ever over the last nearly-twenty years or so, mastering everything from black metal to electronic to art rock to ambient. Since Wars of the Roses, though, they've been losing me. Childhood's End is an interesting new direction for the band but I don't know if I'm really feeling it.

For anyone who doesn't yet know, Childhood's End is a cover album; Ulver takes on various rock bands from the mid-'60s with a psychedelic pop feel. Given that neither '60s rock nor psych pop generally do much for me, it's hard for me to click with the music on this album. Garm's vocals are the only thing reminiscent of older Ulver—not that I wasn't expecting them to change their sound yet again, but the songs don't sound like Ulver songs in the same way you could tell that Wars of the Roses had Ulver songs (even if they weren't particularly good ones).

Not that Childhood's End is bad, though. Given the source material Ulver did quite a fine job crafting new sounds with it. Many tracks have a really nice ethereal quality to them—lots of reverb and background strings, of course—combined with a sort of folky aesthetic (comes with the '60s territory, I suppose). Sometimes it works and they pull out something really great (like "Where Is Yesterday" or "Can You Travel in the Dark Alone?"), but other songs are still a bit too silly or cheesy to warrant more than one listen ("Today" or "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night", among others). Fortunately most of the songs are pretty short, so the bad ones are over soon enough, but I still feel like a lot of the dumber ones should have been trimmed easily.

Even after a few listens I'm still a bit confused by this album. Ulver completionists will of course listen to it, but be forewarned that it's not the same band that you grew to love back with Bergtatt or Perdition City. As an introduction to obscure '60s rock, sure, this might be a good place to start, but I couldn't care less. Dad rockers (yeah I went there) might like it for sentimental reasons, but what dad rocker is going to listen to Ulver in the first place, let alone enjoy their covers more than the originals? And that doesn't really leave us anywhere. Sure, it's a fine album. They did a good job. But why bother?

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