Cult Leader - A Patient Man

I’m back from my “break” (it wasn’t a break at all really), and I’m going a little bit out of order just to fit my writing in where it makes the most sense for the other things filling up my schedule. One of the things I got to do amid the hectic undertakings of my “break” (which, by the way, there’s going to be another one in another few weeks, yay…) was listen to the new Cult Leader album. I wasn’t really interested in listening to it at first, but in the wake of its release I did hear a lot of buzz about the ambitious mark it was supposedly making on hardcore this year. Hardcore, specifically metallic hardcore, has really been on a hot streak lately, both commercially and artistically, so I was definitely open to hearing something that would continue to push the genre into exciting uncharted territories and enhance its presence within metal.

So I checked it out, and what I can confirm is that it does indeed add something a little different to what’s going on in metalcore these days, kind of. But for its uniqueness, the execution on this album was definitely quite awkward, and the more I tried to listen to it and become immersed in it, the more I felt that the whole approach, the very thing that is making this a “boundary-pushing” album in the first place, was something that the band just isn’t at the level of making exciting or something that just doesn’t work.

A Patient Man comes out in the first three tracks all guns blazing with fierce growls and chaotic, death-flavored metalcore noise, not the most groundbreaking stuff, but it gets the blood pumping if you let it do its job. It’s mixed with a little bit of that abyssal black metal guitar dissonance to kind of give it a slightly more apocalyptic feel, but like the hardcore elements, it’s not done in the most unique fashion either. It’s when the album reaches its third track, though, that things get pretty weird.

And that really is one of the awkward aspects of the album: its flow. The album jumps straight from the first three tracks of metallic hardcore aggression into two tracks of dragging, low-key ambience with some dejected low-register clean vocal delivery. The first of the two tracks is kind of melancholically soothing at best, but kind of a boring and utterly redundant listen given the fact that the very next track is just a more intentional and well-constructed execution of the exact same approach, which reminded me a whole lot of what Thou did must more intriguingly on Inconsolable just earlier this year.

The band flip the metal switch back on for a few more tracks, but as visceral as they get in their most heated moments, the band still don’t really sound like they’re doing something all that aggressive even with the contrast of the two big moaning ambient tracks preceding these songs. And the mix of metalcore and blackened death metal on the heavier songs here really isn’t done with much finesse or even the kind of enthralling madness that makes hardcore exciting. I found myself thinking of a lesser-known but far more thrilling release this year from a band called meth. (I wouldn’t have picked that name, but whatever). The band meshed the chaotic hardcore of bands like Converge with the terrifying blackened deathgrind nihilism of a band like Full of Hell. The short album they released earlier this year was fucking terrifying and the clash of high-octane metalcore and soul-consuming black metal was one of the most satisfying products of genre breeding I have heard all year. Cult Leader, on the other hand, similarly blend black metal and metalcore on the heavier songs on this album, but it’s not the same volatile, epic, void-opening black metal that meth. used. Rather, Cult Leader draw from the more apathetic, drone-y side of black metal, and it really makes for such an unfitting compliment to the unrestrained and passionate aggression of the metalcore they’re playing. Again, this combination might be possible and theoretically done well by a band with a clearer vision than Cult Leader, but Cult Leader is sure making quite the case for this style to just be a no-go at its core.

The album ends with another pair of long, moody cuts that really don’t add anything to the album that the first two didn’t, aside from compounding the awkwardness of the album’s flow. Overall, this just seems like such an uncertain release. The band seems to be caught between two very opposing things they want to be, and when they do try to bring these diametric styles together, it just shows how incompatible they are, at least in this format. The hazy, melancholic black metal elements and grungy ambience contradict, rather than juxtapose, the vibrance and fiery energy of the hardcore backbone of the album. I can see the novelty people are seeing in this album, but it’s just not doing anything to make that novelty something artistically convincing.