Crawling forth from the Montana underground, Ulm emerges as a cold, frantic, and unhinged black metal duo. With the prolific Edward Longo handling guitar, bass, and vocals, and the enigmatic Chris Navarro delivering punishing drums, they’ve crafted a raw, ear-piercing sound with intriguing musical twists rarely heard in this genre.
This release dives right into it, with screeching guitars and pounding drums attacking you right off the first track. With cold production and ear piercing distortion on the guitar, it’s rather reminiscent of early USBM, but with Ed’s rather iconic dissonant guitar playing, they’re able to create a unique sound that is able to make them stand out from the rest of the underground. That unique mixture of jazz sensibilities and raw noisy black metal, Ulm cements their own sound. With Ed’s unique dissonant approach to his guitar playing and Navarro’s frantic yet skilled drumming adds to the overall atmosphere while again, cementing that uniqueness.
This is in my opinion, what a continuation of the black metal sound should be. Keeping that original cold atmosphere and raw production is important to keep things “trve” to the genre while fusing unique playing styles and genre elements and sounds that are outside of the metal world, in Ulm’s case a some jazz influence that is unmistakable during the middle of the first track when the song breaks apart and turn into a two-piece jazz outfit from Hell.
I am blown away from this release, not expecting such an intense and all around fun listening experience, Ed yet again adds onto his prolific list of hard hitting albums and Chris’s drumming is simply addicting to listen to. Hearing these two play makes me want to keep coming back more and more. Looking forward to hearing what’s next from this duo.