Under The Midnight Sun

Album review

The Cult stand as one of few bands among their fellow travelers of the mid-'80s alternative-rock boom willing to indulge completely in whatever sonic twists and turns suit them, attempting neither to jump trends or evoke nostalgia. Each new album release over the last 25 years has offered its own sense of "what are they going to be doing now?" anticipation.  To be sure, the Cult have very much worked in their own corner of the atmospheric, riff-laden heavy-rock realm but the ways in which the core duo of Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy revisit that corner for each album often yield surprises, which continues with Under the Midnight.   

Dominated by slow-burn tempos, exploratory guitar lines, and a string-laden ethereality, much of the material has an appropriately atemporal sense of endless twilight. (Apparently Ian Astbury found inspiration from a summertime music festival in Finland where he was wowed by the gentle, mystical vibes.)  As such, Under the Midnight never gets too fiery or too melancholy, sticking instead to an ephemeral middle ground, somewhere between heaven and earth as it were. 

In lesser hands, these songs would certainly come off as plodding, turgid, and indulgent, but there's a surprising lightness, especially on "Knife Through Butterfly Heart" and "A Cut Inside." Sure, a dramatic cut like "Outer Heaven" almost shifts into second gear, but for the most part, everything is content to lay low and slow. Duffy's guitar work makes room for lush string sections (both live and synthesized) throughout, and Astbury is in maximum woo-woo mode, earnestly delivering his wonderfully batty lyrics. Between those vocals, the string sections, and the guitar-as-flourish approach to these spacey songs, it's a stretch to refer to anything here as "hard rock," until you run across a gleefully dramatic tune like "Impermanence," which somehow finds a way to split the difference between Dreamtime-era and Ceremony-era Cult. It's the rare moment that sounds like the Cult may have briefly glanced backward, but stands in such contrast to the rest of the album that it makes the band's continued forward motion that much more appreciable. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz