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Cult item?
An old band look to ‘Rise’ again

BY CARLY CARIOLI

“These guys have been rocking for longer than some of you have been alive!”, shouted a DJ as an introduction to the Cult’s modest set at last Saturday’s WBCN River Rave at Foxboro Stadium. Some dozen bands whirled by on a stage constructed like a lazy susan, so that while one was playing, another was setting up on the back side, reducing the normal set-change delay of 20 minutes to about 120 seconds. (If a better performance-art metaphor has been minted for modern-rock radio’s revolving-door playlists, I haven’t seen it.) The announcement that the Cult are an old band cue’d the youthful audience to take a bathroom break, and that prompted a response from singer Ian Astbury: “For those of you not familiar with this band, we have several records out.” At this point he was still telling the truth. “We are intent on revolutionary rock-and-roll music,” he continued, by this time lying through his teeth, “and we are here exclusively for the music. Some of you are here for the titty grabs. Dirty boys.”

The Cult were lots of things over their first decade. Some seemed to think they were goth (they were originally known as Southern Death Cult); others recognized a strain of latent psychedelia. Ranting at Foxboro, Astbury coined the phrase “metaphysical punk” — though like almost everyone else in the second half of the 1980s, the Cult realized they would have to be a hard-rock band. There just wasn’t anything else to be. And it was by virtue of what they brought to bear on hard rock’s populist refrain — the understanding that hard rock is a device, like onomatopœia or a pair of pliers, that can be made to serve the needs of whoever picks it up — that made them, before the term was in wide use, “alternative.” The irony was that the Cult appeared to become alternative by default — that is, for lack of a better alternative.

That’s how it seemed to me in 1988, when I first saw them — after all, they were opening for Metallica. Back then, the short-lived “progressive” wing of hard rock was fragmenting into two factions. One, personified by the Cult, Love/Hate, Zodiac Mindwarp, Circus of Power, and Warrior Soul, pretty much died when other alternatives presented themselves; the other, personified by Danzig and Corrosion of Conformity, was absorbed back into heavy metal. “The weird thing about the Cult,” writes suburban-metal critic Chuck Klosterman in his memoir/manifesto Fargo Rock City, “is that they were a hard-rock band that people who hated metal always seemed to dig.” Klosterman may have it backward, but the point is that hard-rock kids never really distinguished between self-reflexive hard rock and the other kind. Indeed the Cult — or Astbury, at least — seemed to think of themselves less as an alternative to hard rock than as a virus implanted subversively within it. Not that they had any strict agenda, except their own Cultness, which translated (then as now) into a penchant for serpentine mystery for its own sake. (Inasmuch as earthy mysticism was an alternative to outright sleaze — Jim Morrison had a better idea and used both — the Cult could be said to have had “taste.”) Such notions are instructive as a prelude to the band’s comeback disc, Beyond Good and Evil (Lava/Atlantic), which is very much in keeping with the idea of a Cult album, even though it sounds very little like what anyone remembers of the Cult.

There is just one recognizable Cult song on Beyond, the single, “Rise.” And even if you had heard the Cult only on the Nissan commercial that uses “She Sells Sanctuary,” “Rise” wouldn’t leave you in any doubt as to what band you were listening to — mainly because it borrows the “Sanctuary” hook (the coolest vaguely Middle Eastern psychedelic riff you can play on two guitar strings, with the possible exception of “Paint It Black”). Yet it’s the other part of “Rise” — the thundering metal crunch that introduces the song — that keys you into where the Cult are headed on the rest of the album. They don’t mind reintroducing themselves to their legions of old-school fans, but their real goal is to be mistaken for a contemporary hard-rock band. And perhaps they’ll succeed: large portions of Beyond — beginning with the opening “War (The Process),” which is built around a generic, loping post-blues dinosaur stomp — wouldn’t sound out of place on Metallica’s Load and Re-Load (no coincidence there: all three albums share producer Bob Rock). On the downside, Beyond is unlikely to become anyone’s favorite Cult album. On the upside, I bet I know who they could open for again.

Issue Date: May 31 - June 7, 2001





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