NATTENS MADRIGAL - AATTE HYMNE TIL ULVEN I MANDEN

Back when I was a teen, living just on the outskirts of Copenhagen, I was never far away from the woods. They became my playing ground as well as being one of the greatest places to collect your speeding thoughts surrounding everything that is possible to cram inside a 15 year old boy´s head, who thinks that the world is a pretty big place - and fast becoming even bigger just through his pursuit of music.

The forest was often used as a place you could party, and many a Fridays we, my friends and schoolgirl sirens, would built enormous bonfires and play music all night long. At the time Prodigy and Oasis were big just about everywhere and seeing as we all had the hots for at least one of the attending girls, we´d let them hear "Firestarter" or maybe even "Wonderwall" - if you thought you were in there ;-) As night unfolded and we got more intoxicated by our mixed drinks with vodka-beer-pisang ambon-whiskey-orange juice-rum-thingy, we always seemed to end up putting this particular album on, not really thinking about the horrible consequences it would have on our love lives. Well who needs love at 15, when you have a dark brooding forest, Norwegian Black Metal and a giant fire that seems to lick the leaves off of the highest oak trees around you? We certainly didn´t that´s for sure... And the birds ran screaming into the night leaving only us blackbirds, as you can probably guess.

For the prog community I´d strongly recommend you try Kveldssanger from 1995 first or even the two last releases, before you start exploring this utterly black and bleak record. The music is black metal with it´s coarse sounding evil voice and great big melodious riffing that in time will melt together as dense storm clouds of sound with the vocals being the shattering lightning occasionally breaking through the thicket. From time to time we get small doses of the Norwegian folk flavor that flavored their 2 first outings and made them stand out from the large masses of newly formed black metal bands back in those days. This is a return to traditional black metal, and as Umur says in his review, you can really hear how they intentionally worsened the sound during production - bringing with it a very whispering thin coating of just bad recording technique, but hey that was on purpose and if you talk to anybody who listened to Ulver, Burzum or say Darkthrone back then, they´d say that it sounded the way it should and damn-right evil to boot.

I am not 15 anymore, but I have strong emotions surrounding this very release - and every time i put the album on, I picture myself climbing the highest trees in the woods, screaming my lungs out - howling lycanthrobically at the white moon, jumping through bonfires with a careless look in my eyes thinking never ever will the day come, when the world around me turns me into a grown up and make me forget the beauty of night and the smell of wood fire and sweat on my clothes. It never did.