BERGTATT - ET EEVENTYR I 5 CAPITLER

Ulver has been one of the leading forces in Norwegian extreme/ black metal through the nineties, but has on later album made more experimental electronic music far removed from their extreme metal roots. Bergtatt is Ulver´s debut and it´s a pretty good progressive black metal album.

The music has three main styles. Mid-tempo heavy sections with Garm´s beautiful clean singing and melodic yet brutal riffing, more typical black metal blast beat sections with raw black metal vocals and finally classical inspired acoustic guitar pieces. These three styles are incorporated into most of the songs which means that there are great diversity even within the songs. The fourth song Een Stemme Locker is a bit different as it is acoustic throughout the whole song with some subtle singing and whispering. What is important to point out though is that even the black metal sections are pretty melodic.

The musicians are pretty good, even though I´m not too impressed with the drums from Aiwarikiar. Garm needs to be mentioned as he is a great singer. He masters both the clean singing and the black metal rasps to perfection. His clean singing is distinct and beautiful.

The sound quality could have been better, but in keeping with the early black metal scene this is pretty low-fi. The vocals are produced very well though.

I think Bergtatt is an enjoyable album, and I believe this is a true black metal classic. Even though I keep mentioning that this is black metal I think the style Ulver plays on Bergtatt is more related to a band like Opeth´s early recordings which means I would rather recommend fans of the first two Opeth albums to try this one out than fans of black metal. I think this deserves 3 stars, and I´m sure that I would have given this 4 stars had I been a fan of the band back then. Listening to Bergtatt today it does seem a bit dated though.