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**Shadows Of The Sun**
★★★★☆

In the annals of extreme musical transformation, few bands have traversed as radical a sonic landscape as Norway's Ulver. By 2007, when "Shadows Of The Sun" emerged from the depths of their creative consciousness, the group had already shed every vestige of their black metal origins like a serpent discarding its skin. What remained was something altogether more haunting, more cinematic, and infinitely more unsettling than their corpse-painted past might have suggested.

"Shadows Of The Sun" stands as perhaps Ulver's most cohesive statement in their post-metal incarnation, a meditation on darkness that feels less like an album and more like a fever dream scored for the apocalypse. This is ambient music with teeth, electronic soundscapes that breathe with organic malevolence, and Kristoffer Rygg's vocals floating through the mix like a specter seeking redemption in a world that has already ended.

The album's genius lies in its restraint. Where lesser artists might have cluttered these compositions with unnecessary flourishes, Ulver understands the power of negative space. "Eos" opens the proceedings with crystalline piano notes that seem to fall like tears in an empty cathedral, while Rygg's voice enters with the weight of accumulated sorrow. It's a masterclass in atmospheric tension that sets the tone for everything that follows.

The centerpiece, "All The Love," showcases the band's newfound maturity in spades. Built around a hypnotic electronic pulse that could soundtrack a David Lynch fever dream, the track layers Rygg's multi-tracked vocals into a choir of the damned. The lyrics, sparse but devastating, speak of love as both salvation and destruction. It's the kind of song that burrows into your subconscious and takes up permanent residence.

"Funebre" strips things down to their barest essentials – a simple piano melody, subtle strings, and Rygg's voice delivering what sounds like a eulogy for the world itself. The track's seven-minute runtime never feels indulgent; instead, it unfolds with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. Meanwhile, "What Happened?" builds from whispered confessions to a climax that feels both cathartic and terrifying, its electronic textures writhing beneath the surface like something alive.

The transformation that led to this album reads like musical science fiction. From their 1993 debut "Bergtatt," a folky black metal masterpiece, through the increasingly experimental "Nattens Madrigal" and "Themes From William Blake's The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell," Ulver had been steadily abandoning conventional metal structures. By the late '90s, they had fully embraced electronics and ambient textures, leaving behind guitars entirely in favor of synthesizers, samplers, and studio manipulation.

This wasn't mere artistic restlessness; it was creative evolution in real-time. Rygg, along with core collaborator Tore Ylwizaker, seemed determined to explore every possible permutation of dark music, treating genre boundaries as suggestions rather than laws. Their previous albums "Perdition City" and "Blood Inside" had hinted at this direction, but "Shadows Of The Sun" represents the full flowering of their ambient period.

The production, handled by the band themselves, deserves special mention. Every element sits perfectly in the mix, from the way Rygg's vocals seem to emerge from the ether to the subtle use of field recordings and found sounds. This isn't music you simply listen to; it's music that envelops you, creating an immersive environment that feels both intimate and vast.

Today, "Shadows Of The Sun" stands as a high-water mark in Ulver's catalog, an album that proved electronic music could be every bit as heavy and emotionally devastating as the most brutal metal. Its influence can be heard in countless ambient and post-metal releases that followed, though few have matched its perfect balance of beauty and terror.

The album's legacy extends beyond its immediate impact on underground music. It represents a template for how extreme artists can reinvent themselves without losing their essential identity. The darkness that permeated Ulver's black metal phase remains intact here, merely refracted through different prisms. It's a reminder that true artistic vision transcends genre, and that sometimes the most radical thing a band can do is embrace silence as much as sound.

"Shadows Of The Sun" isn't just an album; it's a journey into the spaces between notes, where meaning lives and dies in the darkness.