Labels: Relapse
Review by: Alex Deller
Reviewing this shortly after Indian’s ‘From All Purity’ is fairly apt and fairly opportune. While sonically distinct, both acts draw from the same broad field and seek to incorporate more expansive electronic elements to their sound. Ostensibly, Culted’s brand of doom is the more ambitious of the two. While Indian possess a bleak, singular intent and ride it mercilessly into the dirt, Culted sway between sounds and textures, weighing their loud n’ proud moments against reverbed scuttles, spoken word passages and ambient washes. At times it’s as though one of those 90s Neurosis segues (you know, mumbling samples and threatening, low level noise…) have been drawn out and twisted into full-length songs, and this is in keeping with the band’s heavier moments, which owe a clear debt to the Oakland titans’ finest days. As an album, the results are interesting if not thoroughly immersive. You can appreciate the scope, and as a fan of low, slow, heavy music there’s not much to disagree with. But, on some level, there’s a failure to gel. Maybe it’s the band’s physical disconnectedness (singer Daniel Jansson is in Sweden while the rest of the band lurk in Canada), or maybe a case of overstretched ambition, but the results fall slightly flat. The heavy parts do not smash your skull or rend your limbs, and in Jansson’s snarl it’s hard to detect a true sense of pain or torment. Elsewhere, the electronic elements often become focal points rather than a fully-absorbed element of the band’s sound, as opposed to the more expertly-constructed terrors of Column Of Heaven, Primitive Man or Full Of Hell. While this might all sound incredibly negative (funny, that, in a doom review…) it’s not necessarily a death knell for ‘Oblique To All Paths’. I can see myself returning to it and continuing to unearth more on each successive listen. Much like Stoneburner’s recent effort, the flaws somehow make the album more endearing, as though you’re willing the album to be something more than it is. This is admittedly faint praise and hardly a glowing recommendation “” after all, why listen to an ambitious failure rather than a glorious triumph? “” but at least it’s something, and certainly more than you can hope for from many a modern, blandly proficient doom endeavour.