Give me winter or Baby it's cold outside and I can't tell you...

In my brain I have this image of an early winter sunset, on the edge of a forest of pine trees. There is a gentile snow falling, and a warrior woman on a horse her body hidden under a cloak. The music in my head, Black Metal, it’s cold, it’s cool, it’s dark and for me it’s something that I can wrap myself in. something that can and will hide me from the elements, and let me slip out of the sunlight and the heat that surrounds me outside.Reality is that I live in Minnesota, or dumbasota as I call it. It’s hot out, the air is heavy, everyone seems to be dressed in as few clothes as possible and I am sweating like crazy. I hate the heat, I always have. I hated seeing her in that dress, I hate seeing all the dumb people out and about acting even dumber, and I hate the crabby, unsettled feeling that I get from the heat.The Black Metal is from a band called Ulver, and it’s different. It’s like snatches of music history, Jazz, big band, opera, and of course rock, all with a dark and sinister edge. Mr. Brightside are you out there? Are you listening? Unlike Ghoul Squad, I don’t love the heat, in Minnesota let along Texas. Ulver is from Norway, a sensible place to live, I heard about them on NPR a while back when their classical music critic was talking about what he liked other than classical and mentioned them. I picked up a few of their tracks, having liked the sample clips NPR played. Now it was a couple of year’s back that a lot of punk survivor types in the A2 were into Black Metal and I didn’t get it. It seemed like thrash/speed metal with screamed or grunted vocals that didn’t make any sense. It didn’t seem fun, and I was in a lot of ways coming out of the darkness of the 1990’s and didn’t need any more Goth whimpering in my life. Ulver is not that at all, it’s different, it’s a sound collage, it’s like the best cyberpunk metal you never heard. It’s what should have been in the movie Hardware 2 that is if they made a Hardware 2. It’s not overly noisy or overly angry, and because I just discover the amazing jazz of Raymond Scott recently, and his style is incorporated into Ulver’s music, it’s got even more of hook for me. Discordant and non-sequiter, but isn’t that what they wanted?