The Cult- Hidden City (2016)

The Cult- Hidden City (2016)

By: Ghost Writer

 

Trying to understand what The Cult is all about, one has to try to figure out what producer Rick Rubin saw on this little known Gothic post punk band from the UK first, it is well known that Rubin´s ambition of always was to create the world greatest rock n roll band, in my mind, the greatest rock band will always be The Stooges, in Rubin's mind, it was a little more complex, it was kind of like Jim Morrison on vocals and AC/DC's Malcom Young on guitars, Rubin tried this crazy mix with The Cult when the band recorded Electric with him, but The Cult are not a mere prefab creation, so they abandoned Rubin, whom latter tried the same approach with another gothic influenced band then known as Samhain, rechristened as Danzig.

To me, The Cult is the ultimate hybrid of UK's post punk and America hard rock (a mix perfectly captured on the album´s leading single Hinterland), with singer Ian Astbury performing as a kind of mixture of David Bowie and Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, although some might tell you he is more inspired by Jim Morrison, I would say filtered thru Iggy Pop, although Morrison´s ghost will always haunt Astbury after the man took the rest of the Doors on tour, but in the beginning it wasn’t so easy, macho minded America would have never accepted post punk, too depressive and sort of delicate for the hardcore crowd, but post punk found its way nevertheless.

The Cult might be responsible, along with The Birthday Party for introducing post punk to the true heart of America, that sound would lurk for decades in the underground, ignored by the masses in love with new wave, later surfacing on bands like Scratch Acid and the Butthole Surfers, and later on bands associated with the “grunge” movement on Seattle, like The Screaming Trees and Soundgarden, in a way Astbury made fashionable to sing more like Jim Morrison than like Robert Plant, thus opening the door for people like Andrew Wood and Eddie Vedder, and as for Billy Duffy, guitarist of the band, one has to recognize his outstanding originality by fusing Johnny Marr to Malcolm Young.

On Hidden City, The Cult´s newest album, the wonderful ability of UK's band to adapt to changes and being able to always come up with music that sounds contemporary is present at every second, that´s part of the band longevity, The Cult has survived trends and fashions in order to become themselves more and more, working again here with their usual producer Bob Rock, the man associated with two awesome sounding records, Motley Crue's Dr. Feelgood, and Metallica's Black Album, one might think that Rock is a guarantee of a lively and powerful sounding record, but I find Hidden City somehow disappointing, yes, the band is still rocking with passion, but this time Rock has somehow put the band in a difficult position, it sounds more like an ambitious overblown record produced by Bob Ezrin than anything else, perhaps The band and Rock consciously tried to avoid the “hard rock” tag, looking for something more liberating, but here they tried so much, that it doesn’t come up so easy.

There are great tracks like the passionate Dark Energy, but Duffy´s guitar are not recorded and mixed in a way that they can achieve biting fury, but they try once again on No Love Lost and they succeed in mixing heaviness and mystics, which is part of what The Cult is all about, but there are some other confusing signs on Hidden City, suddenly you sense that The Cult is moving and evolving once again, Astbury using his mix of Tibetan Buddhism and Native American inspiration in order to look for transcendence, backed empathically by Duffy on songs like Dance The Night or Avalanche of Lights, clear signs that The Cult is starting once again to become something else, leaving a little bit their hard rock side to follow a more fluid path towards a cosmic sound that in the future might need more form Bob Rock, or perhaps a more “epic” producer to capture what this band is starting to create, Hidden City is an interesting record, but it sounds like a trip towards something, not the destiny yet.