the long awaited fourth full length of rings of saturn is finally upon us. it was three years in the making and it was worth the wait. i am familiar with the band for not too long now. since the beginning of this year to be more exact. nevertheless i awaited the record eagerly because their back catalogue is superb. "embryonic anomaly" was a more than solid debut, "dingir" a better follow-up and "lugal ki en" a matured tech-death album that matched up with the big bands of the genre like whitechapel, obscura or decrepit birth.
"ultu ulla" (the sumerian cuneiform of "time immemorial") definitely topped "lugal ki en" in my humble opinion. who thinks rings of saturn is just some alien freak band with stolen riffs and some random breakdowns should take a closer listen to their albums, especially to this one. "ultu ulla" is packed with hooks, melodies and ideas. the song-writing on this album is a few levels better than on the preceding stuff. listen to the opening track "servant to this sentience" and the instrumental "the macrocosm" and convince yourself.
the u.s. offshoot of nuclear blast did quite a few colour versions for this release. the visually more appealing ones were an electric blue with splatter and a green and yellow merge with splatter variant but those were exclusive to either band webshop or tour merch and thus out of the question for me. nuclear blast germany had a few copies of the mint green version in their store and so i opted for one of those copies. again the artwork looks real spaced out and is so rich in detail. great job by mark cooper. next to an opaque yellow version my green copy is part of the most limited edition out of 300 copies. nuclear blast. 2017.
