Review:

on 2011-02-27 CharlesMartel Said:

The Cult were one of those bands which always figured somewhere on the fringes of my consciousness. I heard the odd track here and there but never really paid that much attention to them. I cannot explain why, but somehow they never appeared high enough up on my radar for me to warrant any exploration of them further than the occasional song of theirs I heard, mostly ones which lay in other people's music collections. So, when I finally sat down to listen to this album, and then decided to buy it, the Cult were a comparative novelty as far as I was concerned.

Initially, my reactions were distinctly positive. I liked the sound and it appealed to my mid-eighties broad sensibilities as regards musical taste. So, I went out and bought "Love". Not the standard "Love" but the super-duper, extra-track, remastered, comes-in-a-cardboard wrapper version of the album. It was at that point that I realised that perhaps I may have been a little over optimistic when it came to initial impressions about this being a top-drawer post-punk/Goth album.

It is not a bad album - in places. It certainly has its moments, and the opener "Nirvana" and the well-known "She Sells Sanctuary" are high up there among them. Those are the moments which make this an album worth having and an album worth listening to. But I am pretty sure, on the strength of this, that I shall not be exploring any more of the Cult's back catalogue. You see, the flaws in this are just too legion to overlook and they really pull the rating down significantly.

For a start, the extended re-mastered does-the-laundry for you version is just too long. And I mean too damn long. It is two discs and goes on for well over an hour and a half. There's nothing wrong with long albums per se, but there is a danger that a long album fails to hold your attention throughout. In order to succeed, a long album needs variety. And variety is what is sadly lacking here. For a start, is it really necessary to include four versions of "She Sells Sanctuary" - the original; the long version; the Howling Mix; and "Assault on Sanctuary" - or two versions of both "Rain" and "Revolution"?

As for the rest, well all the songs seem to be cut from the same cloth. Echo effects and wah-wah pedals weigh down the guitars. Billy Duffy seems unable or unwilling to locate a genuine melody and instead sticks to straightforward chord progressions. That in itself is not a disaster, but it approaches it when he does it with every single track on the album. The result is that each of the songs sounds the same - they are pretty much indistinguishable from each other after the first half an hour or so of listening to it. Indeed, the only track which is actually different from the rest is "Black Angel" and while it comes as a relief, it is not a good enough song in its own right to lift the album.

But from there, it doesn't improve. Most of the songs are too long in themselves - some of them seem to go on needlessly long, playing the same chord sequence or allowing Ian Astbury to wail soulfully over the top of it. And while on the subject of Ian Astbury, the first thing which got to me about this album was his voice. After a while it became really irritating. He seemed to have adopted a particular persona or deep voice, heavy on the echo with a lot of wailing. And the lyrics leave a lot to be desired as well. "The Snake" features (over and over again) a reference to the creature's yellowy eyes. And frankly, if you don't know what the word Revolution means to you then you have serious issues.

The more I listen to the album, the aforementioned best tracks apart, the more disillusioned with it I become. It is as if the band decided to do an album of post-punk by numbers: sit down, select the sounds and the styles which sound good across a variety of bands, then stick them all together and call it "Love". If it works, you are arena rockers within a year. If not, it is going to sound really quite naff. It is reminiscent of bands like Simple Minds who always wanted to be U2 insofar as this sounds like a band who always wanted to be a cross between Joy Division, Big Country and the Cure and ended up sounding like a cheap copy of none of them.

The overall result is disappointing, particularly considering the first impressions I had of the album when I listened to it. Maybe if I had eschewed the shiny extended CD and bought a plain old original with just the ten tracks on it, I would have been more impressed. Probably, but I am not sure it would have elevated it to a significantly higher level in my esteem. I listen to it for "Nirvana" and "She Sells Sanctuary" (just one of them) and without those tracks this album would have received a markedly lower rating than it has.
Rating: 5/10