The Cult ‎Love Omnibus Edition

The Cult ‎Love Omnibus Edition

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Despite the heady heights of success scaled by The Cult during the arena rock years from 1987 until their break-up in 1995, their second album Love is by far their best. Originally released in 1985, there simply isn’t a bad song on here, and evergreen rock anthems such as Rain and the iconic She Sells Sanctuary are probably their best known and best loved tracks. Love could arguably be called a transitional album. The band’s first effort, 1984’s Dreamtime, was rooted in the emerging post-punk and goth-rock underground scene. Love represented a quantum leap forward, but their sound had yet to be distilled into the pure hard rock of 1987’s Electric. Ian Astbury’s soaring vocals remained much the same, but Love introduced some Led Zeppelin-sized ambition and sonic scope. Big Neon Glitter and Hollow Man are typical of the album’s outright gothic moments, and the band’s core audience accepted The Cult’s new-found rockist tendencies with good grace – there was still plenty of reassuringly brooding atmosphere to keep them happy. Although the title track and the psychedelia-drenched Phoenix were a heavy hint at things to come, overall Love straddles the rock/goth divide with peerless skill. Black Angel and the exquisite Brother Wolf, Sister Moon show the band to be equally adept at ballads. The sheer variety on display also highlights just how mature their writing was. After all, Astbury and Duffy had yet to hit 25 when Love was released. To the public at large, Love may be all about the big hit singles Rain and She Sells Sanctuary, but write off the rest at your peril. Re-mastered from the original studio analogue tapes, this four-disc box set is a feast for fans. Aside from the original album, there’s a disc of remixes and non-album B sides, a disc of previously unreleased early demos and a disc recorded live in 1985 on the Love tour. Add a 48-page book with unseen contact sheets from the album photo session and a mass of other material assembled by Astbury and Duffy and you have the ultimate version of one of the greatest British rock records of the 80s.

The Cult The Cult As Nominated By Iano1 At Turn On Your Record Player

The Cult The Cult

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The Cult's sixth and final album before a breakup lasting seven years, The Cult features a collection of mature, sophisticated songs and some of the band's best work. The album is filled with interesting melodies delivered with zest and crunch, the faster tunes rocking with abandon and the slower ones tugging at the right emotional strings. Vocalist Ian Astbury delivers a balanced mix of power, despair and anguish, while Billy Duffy's guitar provides the metallic backdrop and maintains The Cult's trademark sparsity of sound. A foursome for this album, Craig Adams on bass is satisfyingly prominent on several tracks, most notably Naturally High, while Scott Garrett's drums shine unobtrusively and remain true to the band's avoidance of an overbearing wall of noise. The five song sequence at the heart of the album, from Naturally High at track 5 to Be Free at track 9, is a spectacular sequence. Naturally High has a fat bass line that challenges most speakers, and escalates to a soaring chorus delivered passionately by Astbury. Joy is assembled around a hovering keyboards tune bolted onto an aggressive Duffy guitar riff. Star effortlessly drops into an infectious dance groove, Garrett's drums pleasingly to the forefront, setting an in-your-face beat which culminates with a great cow bell. Sacred Life slows down the pace with a touching, melancholy melody chronicling tragic young deaths. The quintet is rounded off with the high energy Be Free, Duffy and Garrett again combining to create a celebratory dance metal tune. Elsewhere on the album Real Grrrl and Saints Are Down further enhance the quality of the music, the latter an appropriately haunting slow ending to the band's pre-breakup era. In the post-grunge, call-it-alt-something confused music scene of 1994, The Cult never found an audience, helping to hasten the band's demise as a viable commercial entity. At least when Astbury and Duffy called it quits, their music and songwriting were on a natural high.