Calm your jets, dear reader. I will not force you to slog through the now tired trope that happens with every traditional Ulver review: waxing poetic about the twists and turns their career has taken from primal Black Metal to now, and then explaining how this isn’t metal any more but it’s still worthy of your time.  What will suffice is to say simply: Goddamn.  If you are familiar with Ulver, then you are nodding along right now.  If you don’t know them then seriously what the hell are you doing?  Go listen to Ulver.  Doesn’t matter what album cause they all kill.  I’ll wait.

Flowers of Evil follows the path set up on the last album, The Assasination of Julius Caesar.  If anything, however, it drifts even more into the dark pop realm.  I would go so far as to say there are two or three songs on here that are danceable, in a totally non ironic way.  At the very least the album would make a great soundtrack to a late night makeout session between two strangers with dark pasts, trust issues, and chain wallets.

The whole album is SMOOTH.  Crystal clear production with a  heavy emphasis on drum beats, bass, and keyboards, along with the awesomely mellow vocals.  The lyrics are brooding and melancholy, and sung in a calm, deep voice.  When I close my eyes, I can picture Don Johnson rolling up to the fog shrouded dock while this plays in the background. He waits. The mist clears. Tubbs walks up to the boat and nods- slightly, so slightly that it’s hard to tell if anyone even noticed.  But Crockett does.  He tilts his head, brushes his feathered hair out of his eyes, and guns the engine back into the darkness.

Not my usual metal fare by any stretch of the imagination.  But with Ulver it doesn’t matter.  They are like their own genre at this point, and everything they’ve even done is worth checking out, usually at night with a glass of wine.

Born in 1989, indeed.