In the media frenzy that has coalesced around the release of the new Tool album, it’s easy for a band to get lost amidst the furore. Nonetheless, it is a fact worth celebrating that Cult of Luna are back with a new record, their first album of non-collaborative material since 2013’s Vertikal. An ever-evolving musical body, Cult of Luna, over the course of six full-length records (not to mention that astonishing collaboration with Julie Christmas), have curated a back catalogue that reveals its secrets slowly, the sheer depth of imagination to be found on the likes of vertikal resulting in the listener finding something new with each fresh listen.
New effort, A Dawn To Fear offers typically oblique artwork as well as some eighty-minutes of new music split over a mere eight tracks. It is an immersive, exhaustive listen that offers up some of the band’s most punishing material amidst the atmospheric passages that scatter the sonic landscape.
Opening with the explosive The Silent Man, a gargantuan, ten-minute prog / post-metal epic that seems to delight in obtuse chord sequences and a pummeling rhythm that provides the weightiest of backdrops for the harrowing vocals, The Silent Man impressively melds swathes of glorious melody to the juddering and violent framework in a manner reminiscent of Swans latter-day work. As evidenced by the remarkable live shows (that culminated in the Beyond the Redshift Festival), Cult of Luna’s gift is to take the most scything of riffs, only to suddenly segue into a passage of almost hypnotic beauty without missing a beat, the music ebbing and flowing beautifully and never feeling anything like representative of their actual length. Based around a lysergic beat, the woozy Lay Your Head To Rest slowly builds as successive waves of guitar crash into the listener, the band drawing the listener ever deeper into a gorgeous sonic web that only seems to expand in scope the more you struggle against its deadly, silken threads. Edging into the slow-moving title track, the band continue to temper their more explosive metallic moments with a corroded ambiance that recalls the decaying landscapes of Silent Hill. With harmonised vocals creating a hymnal aspect not dissimilar to latter-day Ulver, A Dawn To Fear is a beautiful example of tension and release, the coruscating sludge that the band finally unleash an as inevitable as it is welcome. Nonetheless, even here the band do not simply pour on molten riffs to no purpose, maintaining an eerie sense of ambiance right to the very end that marks this out as a particularly remarkable song in an already remarkable release. If the title track allowed a sense of space to develop, the crawling claustrophobia of Nightwalkers takes the listener to an altogether darker place, the tactic of repeat and augment evident as the band allow a simple motif to gain in force until it becomes unstoppable.
Opening the album’s dramatic second half, Lights On The Hill is a fifteen-minute piece that develops organically from gentle, echoing guitar work, Cult of Luna are at their most restrained here. A beautiful and stately piece of work with a dry, country twang, Lights On The Hill allows a full four minutes of scene-setting before exploding into life, the riffs falling like raindrops, cleansing the dust from the empty streets in time for the vocals to thunder out from the heart of the mix. An emotionally-charged masterpiece, Lights On The Hill may well be one of Cult of Luna’s finest compositions to date. Shorter, albeit still seven-minute Inland Rain, which, whilst heavier, remains centred around a gorgeous melody that seems to float in the air just in front of the speakers from which it should be clearly emanating. Floydian in scope, Inland Rain still packs a potent punch as it progresses, leaving the way clear for gargantuan, thirteen-minute closer The Fall. A perfect summation of the album’s spontaneous spirit of invention, The Fall is a sprawling work of art, infinite in its majesty and sublime in its scope, it provides a suitably enigmatic finale that promises much in pastures unexplored for future efforts.
By diverging from a set theme and allowing themselves the space to explore their strengths as musicians independently and collectively, Cult of Luna have crafted what is, arguably, their finest work to date. Staggering in its depth, the album requires multiple listens and, preferably, the exclusion of all other activity, to really get to grips with the evocative and emotionally-charged soundscapes that reside within. It is a dense, hypnotic work of art that will still have fans dissecting its inner-workings years down the line. Truly stunning. 9.5
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