Beats and yelling: Cultic

Lore
Out 3^rd October on Eleventh Key

I often use the term “world building” when writing about music. It’s probably worth clarifying what I mean here. History may remember early 21^st Century music not in terms of artistry, but granular developments in technological. Developments that may have seemed small and incremental in isolation, but at the macro level were nothing short of revolutionary. As a result, in the 2020s even a musician of limited talents can, with enough time, patience, and spare cash, pretty much render any sound they can imagine into a reality. The result has been an excess of highly orchestrated, cinematic, dense, and conceptually ambitious albums.

Unconsciously, I suspect this is somewhat motivated by a desire to realise the visions of early extreme metal in the 1980s. Everyone will confess to loving early Hellhammer, Bathory, and Morbid Angel in part for their charm. Implying that a degree of imagination is also required to fill in the blanks peppering these formative efforts. Gaps contemporary artists wouldn’t risk with their own recordings. Now every element must be controlled, not left to chance, every intention of the artist must be clearly spelt out for the listener. In this context, self-imposed limitation look like a natural response. If everyone is offering overproduced, elaborate presentations, or highly configured packages tailored toward specific aesthetic goals, one way to stand out is to regress.

What I find unique about Cultic here is how they attempt to have their cake and eat it. They regress in the literal sense that their music primitive, but throughout this filtration process they add a plethora of supplementary ingredients that populate an otherwise sparse framework, resulting in a work that rises above the sum of its parts, provoking the listener’s imagination into action without force feeding them with surplus information.

The loose framework of ‘Lore’ is much the same as 2022’s ‘Of Fire and Sorcery’. A series of basic death/doom numbers threaded together with ambient interludes that, taken in their totality, form a narrative. As a result its virtues are much the same as the previous album. But there’s no denying the concerted effort Cultic have made to expand their vision. The keyboard sequences are more ambitious in terms of scope and musicality, forming a secondary pillar for the album rather than serving as mere ancillary material. The metal tracks are longer, more aggressive, and more expansive in their expressive range.

Although the riff language pulls from early death/doom, Celtic Frost, Autopsy, and Winter all echoing across these tracks, the orientation of Cultic is entirely based in the fantasy genre, to the point that it informs the flow and pacing of the album. The metallic elements knit the threads together with atmospheric continuity, creating a downbeat, cavernous darkness to offset the flamboyance of the keyboard lines. The riffing is kept deliberately basic and repetitive, relying on the eccentric vocals and the tension created by the depressed tempos to convey size and scope.

As with ‘Of Fire and Sorcery’, the keyboard work draws heavily from traditional dungeon synth (hence the dark dungeon metal tagline), to the point that the album straddles metal and soundtrack music both aesthetically and narratively. The keyboard plays a much more active role at the structural level. Signposting key moments of theatre throughout the album – the heavy, militaristic brass of ‘Imperial Procession’ significantly raising the dramatic stakes midway through the album for example – as well as frequently intervening in the metal tracks with cutting harmonies and simple yet effectively haunting melodies.

With this album, Cultic have broadened the scope of their project, and firmly established themselves as one of the more unique voices in modern metal. Grinding, lo-fi death/doom permeates the album with gradations of violence and darkness, the inherent primitivism of this project offset by expansive keyboard material bridging dungeon synth, soundtrack and video game music. The material is rudimentary, basic even, but there is a such a clear vision and enthusiasm for fantasy world building and storytelling that the experience is exponentially more immersive and captivating than more technical endeavours. Our imagination is put to work, prompted by the framework provided on ‘Lore’, the listener is provoked to actively engage with the music precisely because of its sparsity, in an environment that encourages a two way flow of ideas between the music itself and the listener’s interpretation.