Nowadays it seems as if metal fandom – and I say this as a bit of an ageing hipster myself – is becoming much more of an old guy’s game. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t mean your AC/DC-type legend acts, whose audience you’d already expect to be a mixture of new blood and old lag. Rather, I’m talking about the more avant garde end of the musical spectrum, whose pull is apparently just as strong with Freak Zone listeners as it is with readers of Kerrang.
A case in point is Cult of Luna, the seven-piece who descended on the Haunt Monday last, attracting about as many really serious-looking single dudes in Sunn O))) t-shirts as I’ve ever seen congregate in one place. (Well, since last year’s Sunn O))) gig anyway).
Hailing from Sweden, the band deal in what sometimes gets called ‘post-metal’ – giant great slabs of Neurosis-esque chaos tempered with passages of ambient(ish) Godspeed prettiness. They use three guitarists, a keyboardist and two drummers. Their lead singer – a kind of cross between a WWE wrestler and the Master from Doctor Who – meanwhile sounds like he’s been gargling gravel.
The Haunt gig took place as part of the tour to promote ‘Vertikal’, the futuristic, Metropolis-influenced new album that hopefully should elevate them beyond their perennial cult favourite status. Sure enough the set was heavy with tracks from that odd, brutal record – the end of which, rather bafflingly, they played out of sequence.
After a pre-recorded blast of ‘Vertikal’ instrumental opener ‘The One’, they began with ‘I: The Weapon’, a 3/4-time motorik battering ram that retained every bit of its interest live, despite not being slathered with the record’s electronic effects. They continued in the same bone-crushing vein with ‘Vicarious Redemption’, a 19 (count them) minute long obscenity, by turns sounding like a robotic Agalloch and Steve Reich in a really bad mood.
While most of the set was made up of newer tracks, those newer to the party were catered for with the inclusion of ‘Ghost Trail’ and ‘Owlwood’, two of the highlights of their 2008 album ‘Eternal Kingdom’. Really old school fans meanwhile will have delighted in hearing ‘Finland’ from ‘Somewhere Along the Highway’ – yet another sheet of grinding, churning primal noise, broken up with an icy post-rock freak out. They finished with ‘In Awe Of’, again from ‘Vertikal’, and with a brief goodbye – and no encore – they were gone.
Cult of Luna probably won’t be for everyone, in the same way that a lot of hyper-aggressive, super-heavy angular Swedish art rock isn’t for everyone. But for those with the constitution for it, I can certainly recommend them the next time they make a visit. I can also recommend – again, to those with the requisite stamina – that readers get involved in B-Town’s burgeoning extreme music scene. There’s some really interesting stuff out there in what is swiftly becoming the home of metal on the south coast.
Haunt, Monday 12th August 2013
Word by Phil Mason
Photos by Charles Shepherd
