Review Summary: Disappointment is a meal best served cold.
Ulver is a band of many, many different talents. If you've been a fan of them at all over the course of their 30 year career, you know just how quirky they can be. Ranging from black metal to folk to dark ambient and electronic to trip-hop and all the way to synthpop, these guys have tried a plethora of different sounds and influences. When it was announced that
Neverland was going to see the guys bring back the ambient and trip-hop elements, I was ecstatic. I mean,
Perdition City,
Blood Inside and
Shadows of the Sun are some of their best albums, so if we're getting more of that, then it has to be a win…right?
To be quite honest, this album can't hold a candle to these guys’ prior ambient/trip-hop influenced albums. Too many of these tracks, almost all of them, feel like half-assed ideas tossed into a blender. The production is extremely hollow, and while ambient music is meant to take you on a journey,
Neverland too often feels like it was recorded in a tin can. The album also has no flow whatsoever, another important aspect of ambient music. It just feels like they took one idea, threw it in a random spot, and added another random idea on top of it. Take for example ‘People of the Hills’, a danceable, 80s-inspired synthpop-type of track immediately being followed by ‘They're Coming! The Birds!’, which is some kind of a wannabe horror synth/industrial mashup. The whole album follows this type of trend where it just sounds like random noises piled on top of each other.
I've been an Ulver fan for 20 years and this is the first time that I've found myself really questioning what the guys were thinking when they released an album. Even on the more recent
Liminal Animals, while it wasn't super well-received, you still knew the direction that they were taking. It had enough variance while still maintaining a flow that made the album transition smoothly from one track to the next. ‘Horses of the Plough’ and ‘Pandora's Box’ are some nice, post-apocalyptic-inspired ambient pieces with haunting synths that stick out as highlights, but there isn't enough of that uniformity throughout the entirety of the album.
It's not that anything on
Neverland is particularly bad, it's that it's just kind of a mess that has a bunch of ideas that weren't fleshed-out enough. There are some cool melodies and sick atmospheres throughout the album, but they don't stick around long enough to make any kind of lasting impact on the listener. The entire album clocks in at just over 40 minutes, and for an album that can't stay on a particular idea for longer than two minutes, that just isn't long enough to convey whatever message they were trying to send here. Maybe I sound like a hater and people will get some enjoyment out of this, but if I want the ambient/trip-hop version of Ulver, I'll gladly stick to the earlier albums for all of my needs.
