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Culted: Beyond the thunder of the upper deep

10/05/10 || Khlysty

Look, I really tried this time. This is the fourth fucking draft I’m doing, trying to put into coherent speech everything that one needs to know about Culted and their debut album, cryptically titled “Beyond The Thunder Of The Upper Deep”. The previous three drafts I scrapped, after resorting to arcane language and –mostly pretentious- wordsmithery and deciding that, even then, shit won’t gel into something comprehensible by normal human beings. So, in the end, I said “fuggit” and went for the simplest solution available: just write about the goddamn thing, give as much info as see fit and let everyone else make whatever the fuck they want from it.

So, Culted. A quartet, three-fourths outta Winnipeg, Canada, and the last one fourth, the singer and –probably- lyricist from Sweden. The band members, as their Relapse band-page informs us, have never been together in a real studio in real time. Actually, from what I gather from info I found here and there, the three Canucks of the band live apart from one another and the Swede, well, he’s in Sweden. So the recording process of the record took a lot of music file-swapping over the Internet, a lot of back and forth and to and fro, before being complete and the final product of this whole thing was laid to tape, mixed and sent for production. And, even though I’m not sure that this is the first time a record was made in such a fashion, I can easily tell ya that the final result is one big ‘n’ ugly motherfucker of a record.

Culted plays slow music. It can be seen as doom metal, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg here. See, these fuckers play something that owes as much to doom’s lunatic fringe as to black metal’s more strung-out exponents. Rhythmically, this record’s slower than a lame snail. For this reason alone, it can be classified as doom; BUT the way the guys approach doom is another story altogether. The guitars generally lack doom’s super-saturated bottom-end growl, going for a more buzz-inflected and fuzzy sound, reminiscent of black metal’s trademarked sound, but with more heft and crunch, more midrange and less white-out treatments. The drums have a bizarre hollow, almost spectral quality to them, while the bass –if it exists at all- is pushed so low in the mix as to be almost immaterial to the whole proceedings.

Riff-wise, the two guitarists go for slow but elaborate schemata, that at times approach melody and majesty and at others border on atonality and dissonance. Here and there one might find small but extremely effective –if surprising- detours in psychedelia (an intro here, a small break there), while great pains have obviously been taken to create an overall atmosphere of suffocating despair and gloom. Which is very effectively enhanced by the vocals: Daniel Jansson’s treated screams and wails give even the best of black metal screechers a run for their money and add even more desperation and almost universe-collapsing gravitas to the already extremely gloomy ambience of the music.

I also have to make special reference to the ingenious exploitation of sound effects and production tricks (as the buried piano found in “The Latter Fire”, the song which concludes the record) that add even more depth and a sense of cosmic desperation to the whole thing. The production is incredible, as it combines rawness with detail and heft with a spectral quality that, combined, render the music as in-your-face as possible and, at the same time, totally otherwordly. The songs are pretty longish (ranging from five to almost thirteen minutes in length), but they never seem to fall in a rut of redundancy, while the orchestration and playing is full of ideas and surprises.

The bottom line is that Culted emerge as a fully-formed band, with a sound all of its own and poised to take the world of doom metal by force. The music contained within “Beyond The Thunder Of The Upper Deep” is an ingenious mixture of complexity, despair, rawness and inspiration. This is a record that’s as experimental as anything done by, e.g., Khanate, but more approachable and, at the same time, more left-brained and barbed than the vast majority of doom, black metal or any combination of the two subgenres one can find today. To wax poetic for a bit, Culted sound like a slow-moving tornado filled with shards of broken glass. Pain and majesty combined. Great, fucking great record! Great, fucking great band!

Information
Released: 2009
Label: Relapse Records
Website: Culted MySpace
Band
Daniel Jansson: vocals, ambiance
Michael Klassen: guitar, bass, percussion, noise
Matthew Friesen: guitar, bass, percussion, noise
Kevin Stevenson: drums

Tracklist
01. Tyrant cold
02. Social control
03. Place of skulls
04. Heel on your neck
05. Gunburn
06. The latter fire

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