Childhood's End (album)

Frontman Kristoffer Rygg explained that Childhood's End was "one of those projects I'd been meaning to do for some time. In my 20s I found myself coming up short with new things to like. It wasn't until the late '90s when I discovered a true fascination with psychedelic music, and even prog. That was when '60s and '70s music really took hold, and I've been more and more into it ever since. I listen to a lot more stuff from that era than I do modern music."[2] Rygg spent considerable time "digging around" to find the right songs to cover and explained that "[t]here's a missionary aspect to all this too, to make an exclamation mark to the fact that there are fucking golden nuggets before your Black Sabbaths."[2]

Rygg describes the album as connected to the themes of Ulver's 1998 album Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in that both explore "the same idea of shattered illusions and a lost childhood".[2] He elaborated this by explaining that the 1960s were "sort of a cultural movement... that became disillusioned and quite dark. I was thinking of a kind of Blakean strain, a loss of innocence. I've always thought that this particular era and the spirituality of it was very childlike in many ways. Suddenly there was Altamont and Charles Manson, cocaine and heroin, then Watergate later".[2]

The album was recorded in two sessions. The first, in autumn 2008, featured Lars Pedersen on drums. For the second session, in summer 2011, Tomas Pettersen drummed.[6]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
About.com	[7]
Exclaim!	Favourable[8]
The New York Times	Favourable[9]
Rolling Stone	[10]
Sound and Vision	[1]
Record Collector	[11]

The album received generally favourable reviews.

Ben Ratliffe, writing for The New York Times, praised Childhood's End for its treatment of the original music, commenting that "these cover versions reward the ambition of the original songs, draping them with stateliness".[9] Placing the album in the context of Ulver's discography, Ratliffe noted that Childhood's End is "the most straight-ahead Ulver record ever, but still strange".[9]

Natalie Zina Walschots wrote similarly in Exclaim!, describing the album as "deceptively simple", featuring an "achingly familiar" set of songs that, "rather than evoking fondness or nostalgia, conjure the unsettling shadow versions of themselves".[8] David Fricke, with Rolling Stone magazine, wrote that the album "is more than hip-covers fun" that "darken[s] the apocalypse in acid-Sixties relics".[10]

Stating that Ulver's choice of covers possesses a kinship with the band's own creative ambitions, Sound and Vision's Michael Berk observed that Childhood's End "is not so much a departure as a literature review; drawing the connections between Ulver's own experimentalism and the psych bands who, possibly without a clear idea of what they were doing, pushed the boundaries of rock in the '60s further than any of their mainstream contemporaries".[1]

Dayal Patterson, writing for Record Collector, said “Ulver are nothing if not unpredictable and ever-evolving. With a contemporary edge that occasionally removes the furry ambiguities of the originals and replaces them with a dark sense of the epic, the album bears enough of Ulver’s touch (particularly thanks to founder Kristoffer Rygg’s vocals), meaning that this should be palatable for fans of the band new to garage and psychedelic music. Others will find this rewarding – if perhaps a little unnecessary – and there’s little questioning the delivery or attention to detail here. Probably not at the top of the wish list for most followers of the group, but a pretty successful deviation nonetheless.”[11]