Vertikal
According to a press release, "Vertikal" marks a much-anticipated return for the band after five years spent cultivating the ideas and directing the influences that have helped form a concept for the album. Distilled throughout are themes of machinery, repetition and clear, linear structures honed to the visual imagery of Fritz Lang's classic expressionist science fiction film "Metropolis".
An heir to both Neurosis' sprawling post-metal cycles and their persistent development as an ensemble, Sweden's Cult of Luna is as much a posse as a band. Their sixth album unveils remarkably progressive doom, putting the surly form in uncomfortable positions and often finding a payload.
On Vertikal, the sixth album from Cult of Luna, the Swedish band returns after a five-year gap with an album of rigidly structured and massively heavy post-metal.
The rub is that Cult of Luna do the 13-minute-song thing so well on their sixth album (which is about four hours long) it's scary, adding in a healthy dose of experimental electronics (wait, don't run away just yet), while tunes like "Synchronicity" have a wonderful and oddball key/guitar interplay.
CULT OF LUNA have a confession to make. Turns out the "true story" behind the Swedish group's most recent LP, 2008's "Eternal Kingdom" - something to do with a mad man's diary, filled with ramblings about a fantasy world, unexpectedly surfacing in their rehearsal space - was in fact entirely fabrica...
A review of Cult of Luna - Vertikal which is out from Indie Recordings on the 25th of January in Norway, Germany and Austria and the 29th everywhere else!