BLUT AUS NORD — Ultima Thulée (review)

BLUT AUS NORD — Ultima Thulée album cover Album · 1995 · Atmospheric Black Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4.5/5 ·
Vehemency
Before Blut Aus Nord ventured into the grounds of more experimental black metal sounds, it came up with a couple of more traditional black metal albums, Ultima Thulée being the first album. I might mislead the reader here when I describe this as traditional black metal because Ultima Thulée isn’t a basic Darkthrone worship album, no, the band has definitely its own thing going on here with a brilliant winter atmosphere. This is traditional only in the shadow of the band’s later era with industrial sounds and horror elements that slowly began to form in the 2000s.

On Ultima Thulée, Blut Aus Nord sounds absolutely desolate, cold and magical. The original black and white cover art depicts the album truthfully: it is indeed a really wintry album and one of the best in that category. The guitar sound is really heavy and while the guitar is responsible for most of the great melodies on the album (hear the middle section of ”On the Way to Wigrid” and the odd but great guitar outro of ”The Plain of Ida”), synth melodies are of great importance here, sometimes in total interplay with the guitars and sometimes exclusively in the spotlight - both styles witnessed in the middle sections of ”From Hlidskjalf”, a definite highlight on the album. ”My Prayer Beyond Ginnungagap” takes the role of the most original track on the album, being a 5-minute track of sole clean male chanting. It fits perfectly to the repetitive and atmospheric nature of Ultima Thulée: this is the real a cappella of early Blut Aus Nord’s black metal.

It is a mystery to me how an album like ”Ultima Thulée” can be conceived, and apparently it’s unknown to everyone else too, because ”Ultima Thulée” hasn’t faced any serious contenders although it’s been 15 years since its initial release. Surely bands like Paysage d’Hiver know how to create wintry atmospheres, but these two bands still play very different styles in my eyes so I wouldn’t start to compare them at all. ”Ultima Thulée” does have its weak points but they are rare: only few moments of the album sound mediocre but it is allowed because it’s still one hell of a 52-minute escapism journey to desolate winter mountains.
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