Welcome to The Harmonic Series, a daily(ish) music review series - exclusive to Steemit - where I’ll be discussing music across many different styles and genres from metal, to electronic music, to jazz and beyond! I’ll be talking up exciting new releases, some of my personal classics, and anything else that I think is worth checking out. Some of the reviews I share will be brand new, and some will be from my personal archives.
Today's review is one of my favorite albums of the year so far:
Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas - Mariner (Indie Recordings, 2016)
Genre: Metal
Style: Post-Metal, Prog, Doom
Mariner got recommend to me by several friends repeatedly, and the eye catching album art had it stuck in my mind for a while. I procrastinated on listening to it, but when I finally did I was kicking myself for not doing so sooner. I had heard of Cult of Luna before listening to this album, but not Julie Christmas, and although I had a moderate interest in post-metal from listening to the savage yet polished music of Isis, this album is really what put me on to the genre. Of course, this album has a not-so-secret ingredient that sets it apart from other post-metal albums: its incredible guest vocalist, Julie Christmas.
Christmas is a prolific collaborator, working with musicians from acts such as Neurosis, Candiria, and The Dillinger Escape Plan, and in learning of her, I wondered why she wasn’t already on my radar. When I listened to this album, it was clear that she needed to be. Her performance here can be summed up best as flexible and vital. From confident and powerful clean singing, to the absolute most tortured shrieks I’ve ever heard from a human, to one particular line on Chevron delivered in an eerie, breathy voice, she carries the songs on this album through their ferocious highs and their bleak lows. Her melodic lines too are impeccable, and the fact that she was in charge of lyrics on this album enhances that even more. The vocals that Cult of Luna bring to the table are less remarkable standard post-metal fare, but still powerful in their simplicity. If you’re familiar with Isis (and not Cult of Luna for some reason), they’re very similar.
Instrumentally, this album has a lot of what I’ve come to expect in post-metal. Tremolo picked guitars soaked in delay a-la-Godspeed You! Black Emperor, electric piano, and rich, crunchy rhythm guitar tones. The drum playing varies between groove oriented and the more dynamics oriented style typical of post-rock. The groove oriented playing pairs perfectly with the vocals and these two elements do the most to propel the momentum of the album. Synths play a big role too, such as during the intro of The Wreck of S.S. Needle and the heavily ambient Approaching Transition, the one track on this album that doesn’t include any of Christmas’ vocals. Compared to the fierce and confident energy - one could even say bluster - of the preceding tracks, this one feels bleak and minimal. This track verges on being primarily post rock, albeit with a transition to something closer to doom at its climax, and perfectly prepares the epic closing track.
One of my favorite formats for albums is the 5-track prog-metal concept album, and this is a great example of that structure. With each track increasing in length from the 8 1/2 minute opener to the nearly 15 minute closing track, Mariner has an epic feeling that only grows. Thematically, this album is quite heavy and bleak; Cult of Luna’s Johannes Persson has described it as "a journey into the unknown,” and the official announcement of the album described it as follows:
"At the end of Vertikal, we stood in the cold harshness of the mechanical city and looked up onto the stars. We lost ourselves in the awe of their grace and thought that 'maybe the answer is to be found above.' The ship was leaking and by to look of it, our home was dying. No room for fear when a greater call demands your full attention. So, we left... Onward, forward. Like the old seafarers, we explored the vastness of space. Not bound by physical laws we pass the speed of light and chase the expansion of space until we reach it's limit. And then, we continued on and disappeared. This is our story."
The space exploration themes are filtered through an obtuse lens of oceanic imagery, metaphor, and simile, as evidenced by the title Mariner. On A Greater Call, Christmas sings: “We are not conquerors. We float with the tide,” setting the ambiguous protagonist(s) of this album as helpless in the face of the uncaring universe, subject to the ripples of space-time. The themes of this song include the hope, faith, and sacrifice necessary to explore new territory and the challenges that lay ahead. Chevron paints a picture of a stand against struggle and adversity, of being “lonely little diamonds heading home to find, instead of something - nothing. Not a single soul.” The Wreck of S.S. Needle evokes more struggle and the hard work needed to make progress with the clever extrapolation of a common expression: “you’ve got to spit to see the shine.” As the album reaches its penultimate track, Approaching Transition, one gets the sense of this drift towards the edges of the universe.
The final track, the epic 15 minute Cygnus, is perhaps the most compelling both musically and thematically. Cult of Luna’s harsh vocals restate the same lines as in Christmas’ clean verses, and in the sections when both are present, they play off each other with varied rhythms and interaction. This track was apparently influenced by the “Star Gate” sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which shows through in the constant momentum and repeating patterns of the songs climax. This track includes some of the most opaque lyrics on the album, but also some of the most beautiful in purely aesthetic terms, if nothing else. Christmas sings, with effortless rhyming and alliteration:
“Leave her to sing her withered songs,
In tunnels painted like the dawn,
To write a letter to the night,
This sightless, songless, silent giant”
With its dynamic range, ideal production, and powerful climaxes, Mariner has positioned itself as one of my favorite albums of the year. Julie Christmas delivers a wild excitement and energy every moment of her performance, and shows amazing range, at times coming off as alternately girlish and ghoulish. Coincidentally, I find some of the themes of this album somewhat related to this platform, Steemit. The concepts of delving into a new frontier, especially through the lens of the ocean depths (think minnows, dolphins, and whales) - something we as a civilization know less about than we do about the vast expanse of space - can certainly have parallels drawn with the new territory that is blockchain based social networking, and its inventive economic model. Regardless of interpretations though, this album feels like one of the greatest I’ve heard in recent memory, and certainly has a place in my heart. When delving into unfamiliar territory, consider taking Mariner as your soundtracking anthem.
To buy Mariner, head over to Cult of Luna's Squarespace page.
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