Cult of the Moon - Lunar Eclipse
Maybe I should start a food blog.
Although I don’t allude to it often in my reviews, I love food, and the culinary arts as a whole. Though I do employ the occasional writing cliché of “Too many cooks”, or write a preamble about street food, it's not what I’d call a stylistic cornerstone of mine. Despite that, I find that cooking and music have a lot in common when it comes to the creative process. The careful measuring of ingredients, their assembly and preparation, and obviously the time and place they’re made in.
With that out of the way, I’d like to take a moment to talk about soup. To the uninitiated, it’s a simple dish, you just chuck a bunch of stuff in a pot full of water and let it boil for a while. Anyone versed in cooking will tell you though that the ingredients thrown in do matter, as does their preparation. If you just dump whatever’s in your pantry, any potential synergy between flavours will be obliterated, resulting in something that has a perhaps intense, but ultimately nondescript, flavour. You have to exercise caution in regards to what you’ll throw in, at what point, and how you’ll prepare it in advance, so as to have a filling meal that’ll provide you with warmth. For better or worse, Cult of the Moon’s Lunar Eclipse is made with the former method.
While the introductory one-two punch of the title track and “Sun Offering” doesn’t really rock the boat that much in terms of eclecticism, providing us with some rock-solid melodic black metal tunes, flowing through melancholy tremolo riffs and gloomy acoustic passages. They’re very much of a modern disposition in their composition, the former song employing a rather typical build-up in introducing the album, starting with acoustic guitars, the other instruments slowly dropping in and increasing the pace, whereas the latter constructs its verses around some robust palm-muting, sprinkled with some moody arpeggios. The heavy metal-inspired duelling leadwork does lend the songs some individuality, but it doesn’t take long for things to start going off the rails, as “Sun Offering” concludes with an unexpected piano part that does little except slam the brakes on the momentum that was carefully being built up until then.
This is where the soup allegory comes into play, as each composition builds itself around ideas and motifs that are one-and-done experiments for the band. While part of me wants to commend them for their willingness to play around with their sound, the disparity felt on a track-by-track basis is far too great for me to be able to appreciate this as a fully cohesive experience, arguably the defining trait of the album format. The aforementioned soloing (which is excellent mind you) is the only consistent stylistic trademark throughout <i>Lunar Eclipse</i>, as the flaccid rocking pace of “Curse” – though it does admittedly boast a great chorus – doesn’t quite match up with the Scooby-Doo symphonics of “The Dawn That Never Comes”, or the folky autumnal flavours of “Lonely God”. There’s so many ideas here, and while the Cult of the Moon does exhibit a solid grasp of what makes them tick, they don’t exactly line up with each other. Imagine if instead of chopping up the ingredients so that you could get a little bit of everything on each spoonful, you just dropped the whole vegetable (or meat) in. Sure, the water picks up some of the flavour, but when you try to get to the proverbial meat of the soup, you just get a single ingredient to indulge on, when you clearly threw more than that in.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all of these experiments resonate with me, though I did find myself enjoying the thunderous pace of “Sheol”, the martial pace of the introduction escalating into some ferocious black metal riffing that is laced with some unusually dissonant arpeggios at the end, not to mention the harried double-bass drumming that drives things forward. “Beneath My Leaves” is another winner here, its bright, post-black melodicism colliding with charging stop-start riffing, resulting in a multi-faceted and riveting song. Both of these tracks plant their feet firmly on the ground, and their diversions don’t feel too far removed from the meloblack core that the band has been founded on, resulting in focused songwriting that has an identity of its own despite operating within established parameters.
While there is a lot to be said about a soup that has too many ingredients in it, let it be known that it’s not the mark of a cook who doesn’t love what they do. There’s a lot of excitement that comes along with throwing everything that you love and has influenced you in a work that you wish to present yourself with to the outside world, and Cult of the Moon tries to showcase every aspect of themselves on Lunar Eclipse. Brimming with potential as it may, the process has resulted in a chimeric work that is at odds with itself on every other turn. Nevertheless, there is room for further development and refinement to be done, and the quartet is more than capable of paring things down to create a more cohesive experience in the future. After all, cooking isn’t about using everything you have in one dish, but knowing when to add that little extra that’ll elevate it to the next level.
Highlights: Sheol, Beneath My Leaves, Lonely God
With that out of the way, I’d like to take a moment to talk about soup. To the uninitiated, it’s a simple dish, you just chuck a bunch of stuff in a pot full of water and let it boil for a while. Anyone versed in cooking will tell you though that the ingredients thrown in do matter, as does their preparation. If you just dump whatever’s in your pantry, any potential synergy between flavours will be obliterated, resulting in something that has a perhaps intense, but ultimately nondescript, flavour. You have to exercise caution in regards to what you’ll throw in, at what point, and how you’ll prepare it in advance, so as to have a filling meal that’ll provide you with warmth. For better or worse, Cult of the Moon’s Lunar Eclipse is made with the former method.
While the introductory one-two punch of the title track and “Sun Offering” doesn’t really rock the boat that much in terms of eclecticism, providing us with some rock-solid melodic black metal tunes, flowing through melancholy tremolo riffs and gloomy acoustic passages. They’re very much of a modern disposition in their composition, the former song employing a rather typical build-up in introducing the album, starting with acoustic guitars, the other instruments slowly dropping in and increasing the pace, whereas the latter constructs its verses around some robust palm-muting, sprinkled with some moody arpeggios. The heavy metal-inspired duelling leadwork does lend the songs some individuality, but it doesn’t take long for things to start going off the rails, as “Sun Offering” concludes with an unexpected piano part that does little except slam the brakes on the momentum that was carefully being built up until then.
This is where the soup allegory comes into play, as each composition builds itself around ideas and motifs that are one-and-done experiments for the band. While part of me wants to commend them for their willingness to play around with their sound, the disparity felt on a track-by-track basis is far too great for me to be able to appreciate this as a fully cohesive experience, arguably the defining trait of the album format. The aforementioned soloing (which is excellent mind you) is the only consistent stylistic trademark throughout <i>Lunar Eclipse</i>, as the flaccid rocking pace of “Curse” – though it does admittedly boast a great chorus – doesn’t quite match up with the Scooby-Doo symphonics of “The Dawn That Never Comes”, or the folky autumnal flavours of “Lonely God”. There’s so many ideas here, and while the Cult of the Moon does exhibit a solid grasp of what makes them tick, they don’t exactly line up with each other. Imagine if instead of chopping up the ingredients so that you could get a little bit of everything on each spoonful, you just dropped the whole vegetable (or meat) in. Sure, the water picks up some of the flavour, but when you try to get to the proverbial meat of the soup, you just get a single ingredient to indulge on, when you clearly threw more than that in.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all of these experiments resonate with me, though I did find myself enjoying the thunderous pace of “Sheol”, the martial pace of the introduction escalating into some ferocious black metal riffing that is laced with some unusually dissonant arpeggios at the end, not to mention the harried double-bass drumming that drives things forward. “Beneath My Leaves” is another winner here, its bright, post-black melodicism colliding with charging stop-start riffing, resulting in a multi-faceted and riveting song. Both of these tracks plant their feet firmly on the ground, and their diversions don’t feel too far removed from the meloblack core that the band has been founded on, resulting in focused songwriting that has an identity of its own despite operating within established parameters.
While there is a lot to be said about a soup that has too many ingredients in it, let it be known that it’s not the mark of a cook who doesn’t love what they do. There’s a lot of excitement that comes along with throwing everything that you love and has influenced you in a work that you wish to present yourself with to the outside world, and Cult of the Moon tries to showcase every aspect of themselves on Lunar Eclipse. Brimming with potential as it may, the process has resulted in a chimeric work that is at odds with itself on every other turn. Nevertheless, there is room for further development and refinement to be done, and the quartet is more than capable of paring things down to create a more cohesive experience in the future. After all, cooking isn’t about using everything you have in one dish, but knowing when to add that little extra that’ll elevate it to the next level.
Highlights: Sheol, Beneath My Leaves, Lonely God
Rating: 55%
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