Avant-garde metal bands seem to have a thing about collaboration albums. Sunn 0))) have previously worked with the perpetually miserable Scott Walker, Neurosis spent 2003 recording with Swans singer Jarboe and now Cult of Luna are continuing the tradition by partnering up with Julie Christmas. Their seventh full-length sees them journeying into outer space with the noise-rock legend and it’s a hell of a trip. In fact we’d go so far as to say this is probably the best album of the year thus far. Be warned though, it can be a tough listen. This is not the action-packed space of Gravity or Star Wars, this is the cold, malevolent emptiness of Alien or 2001 and listening to it is both nightmarish and enthralling. For starters, Christmas is an excellent fit for the reverberating waves of sonic power that Cult Of Luna create. She has a voice that is beautiful yet frightening, capable of sounding sugary-sweet one moment and utterly deranged the next. With the Swedes playing desolate passages alongside her, ‘Mariner’ winds up sounding like being inside Harley Quinn’s mind while she watches Eraserhead. Christmas doesn’t completely dominate the vocals, Cult members Johannes Persson and Fredrik Kilhberg still get to exercise their pipes, but the contrast of her sugar-coated poison and their melancholy musical landscapes is a perfect fit. It’s used to good effect on opener ‘A Greater Call,’ the album’s equivalent of standing in a lift heading up to the launch pad while quietly weighing up the odds of coming home, before the excellent ‘Chevron’ sees the engines ignite and blast up into the stratosphere. There are sequences here that roar with the fury of a shaking cockpit, with prog-rock keyboards flitting in and out and tribal percussion pummelling the eardrums. ‘The Wreck Of The SS Needle’ meanwhile has the closest thing to a vocal hook you’ll find on the album, its nine and a half minutes of moody fury ending with Christmas repeating a single line in a way that almost makes it catchy. ‘Approaching Transition’ is even longer and sounds like a visitor from an alternate universe where Pink Floyd embraced metal music to a far greater extreme, while the closing ‘Cygnus 1’ is a bold and emphatic statement to end on. The grinding, mechanical introduction builds for two minutes before exploding into life with big riffs and death growls. Elaborate guitar melodies soon work their way in along with more straightjacket falsettos and the whole song travels through several different moods before climaxing in spectacular fashion. It’s a strange, beautiful and frightening song, similar to staring at an incredible sunset on the surface of an alien world, before hearing a strange hiss and realising your air supply is leaking through a crack in your visor. ‘Mariner’ isn’t an easy album by any means but once you commit to it, there’s an entire universe to be found inside.
Released 8th April 2016
‘Mariner’ isn’t an easy album by any means but once you commit to it, there’s an entire universe to be found inside.
