By: Richard Maw
Album Type: Full Length
Date Released: 16/03/2018
Label: Nordvis
The Hunt is bleak, dark and quite beautiful, highly evocative of
nature and all that is fresh and clean. If this sounds like your kind of thing,
it will be. This is a fantastic record.
“The Hunt” CD//DD//LP track listing:
1).
Invocation
2).
The Trial
3).
The Dance
4).
The End
5).
The Hunt
6).
The Break
7).
The Run
8).
The Gloom
9).
The Truth
10).
Močvara/Мочвара
The Review:
Ulvesang play folk- or neofolk/dark folk to
be more accurate and hail not from Sweden or Norway but from Canada- still the
Frozen North, so quite fitting. The two piece specialise in very dark but
pretty acoustic textures. Being as this is an instrumental work (or without
lyrics at least), what images it conjures up are a matter for the individual
listener, but I would imagine that many listeners would find the sound and
atmosphere here to be evocative of the forest, leaf and stream and all that is
natural.
It
is perhaps odd to some that this might fit right in alongside black metal, but
not for me. It is bleak, it is dark, it is quite beautiful- similar to the very
best of the black metal genre. Fans of Winterfylleth, eagerly
awaiting their forthcoming acoustic record, and fans of the more ethereal work
of Ulver and so on will find much to enjoy
here.
The
opening intro of “Invocation” sets
the mood and the mood does not falter from there on, whether it be the
bitter-sweet “The Trial” or the
wistfully bleak “The End”- the
textures are richly dark. However, the feel is not necessarily cold; there is
melancholy and bleakness but the album is never grim; maudlin might be a better
description. The ten tracks are all highly evocative of nature and all that is
fresh and clean. If this sounds like your kind of thing, it will be. A
fantastic record.
