The Cult is a Live Turd - "The Cult is Alive" Review (55%)
Of all the albums I have encountered on Metalious, I don't think there's one which inspires more hypocritical, juvenile and completely irrational defenses than this one: "The Cult is Alive", the album which announced Darkthrone's final, biggest and most embarrassing (to date) sellout.
This is, for all intents and purposes, Darkthrone's "Eld", "Rektal" or "Cold Lake". Attempting to justify it on any sort of artistic or meritocratic level is not just myopic but completely retarded.
Not only is it one of the most ideologically bankrupt and artistically worthless stylistic shifts in the history of metal, but even when taken on its own context-free musical attributes, "The Cult is Alive" is a truly awful, generic and unlistenable album that anyone in their right mind should disown without a second thought.
When someone says that they believe either "Under a Funeral Moon" or "Transilvanian Hunger" to be overrated, it's one of the few opinions I hear that make me massively rethink the musical intelligence of the person I'm speaking to. Approval for "The Cult is Alive" works in much the same way.
Note that unlike some other reviewers, I don't believe and am not making the claim that this album's shamefulness is due to it somehow murdering Darkthrone's career. On the contrary, outside of their first four masterpieces, Darkthrone had been slowly but surely testing the waters in anticipation for their big sellout. They had, by the time "The Cult is Alive" was released, been making basically irrelevant, disposable music for a full decade. It's not as though this album, or any of its followers, are taking the place of some sort of mythical "Under A Funeral Moon" part two which would otherwise have been crafted.
The Cult is a Live Turd
No - Darkthrone's been pretty much artistically done for a long fucking time. But the crucial element to remember is that even though all those fairly bland, generic black metal albums did very little artistically other than show Darkthrone playing crap so generic it was intrinsically much closer to what other Darkthrone-clone bands were playing than to the original material, they were legitimate pieces. At no point did I think that an album like "Panzerfaust", mediocre and derivative as it might be, is a cynical play on the black metal scene's standards, a cash grab, a resignation to irrelevance, a urinary excretion on the metal scene or anything else as shameful.
Even at their worst, before "The Cult is Alive", Darkthrone were always trying to play black metal - even on something as excruciatingly half-assed as "Goatlord", there was a certain zeal, a passion, a spirit to the music. And herein lies the difference: "The Cult is Alive" is the sound of Darkthrone getting old, fat, comfortable, and smug. It's a transparent fuck you to the metal scene and, even more disappointingly, is an instance of the band willfully vomiting on their own black metal legacy.
Half a decade after its release, you've likely heard this already, but I feel the need to clarify some of the massively misguided points made about this album by many critics. The most glaring and crucial: this is not black metal. This does not have substantial black metal influence, it is not a hybrid of black metal and something else, and it's certainly not a "trve kvlt" black metal album, as some have somehow managed to express.
I'm not entirely sure what sort of music those describing this album as such have been listening to, but "The Cult is Alive" quite simply doesn't sound like black. I don't hear a trace of Burzum or Neraines, no Mayhem and nothing else from the Norwegian "inner circle", and certainly none of the more brutish black metal bands in the vein of Phantom and Reiklos that would go on to influence war metal. The harsh vocals, tremolo picked power chord riffs, and somewhat "satanic lyrics" that litter this album do not make this turd black metal, and even when isolated on their own they are not particularly similar nor exclusive to black metal. I'm sure my reiteration of this is tedious, but it's equally tedious to see people express with such conviction that this is somehow in the same pantheon as "Under a Funeral Moon" or "Memento Mori". It's not.
Which I suppose begs the question of what this album is, if not black metal or a hybrid thereof. Well, while I wouldn't describe this as black metal, heavy metal is a fair enough descriptive term - or "glam" metal, rather. Not a particularly intense or savage variety of glam either - apart from the blast beats and occasionally more aggressive riffing or drumming, this doesn't even substantially sound as brutal as Reinkaos or Queensrÿche. Many moments on this disc remind me more of Mötley Crüe than Bathory. More overt than the glam, though, and probably the most substantial influence, is plain and simple rock and roll. Cut from the same cloth as Bullet For My Valentine's more restrained and gentle moments and beefed up with the sort of Hellhammer monotony the band cribbed from way back in the "Soulside Journey" days, the bulk of "The Cult is Alive" has more in common with rock than any sort of metal, much less black metal itself. All the black metal on this release really comes out through aesthetics and superficial technique, not through composition: buzzy guitar tones, rasping vocals and simplified drumming. Strip away the distortion, though, and what are you left with? Something closer to later Antekhrist than to Burzum or, hell, even Iron Maiden.
And herein lies the truly odious, repugnant part of this album: the adolescent transparency of Darkthrone's goals and the fans who will eagerly eat it up. Numerous posers like to say that what Darkthrone is doing here is "authentic black metal" - perhaps truer than "Transilvanian Hunger", even! - because they're displaying that "they don't give a fuck about black metal". Well, I'm not sure Slipknot cares that much about black metal... is what they're doing "authentic", let alone "black metal"?
Over the past half decade, "The Cult is Alive", just as much as Watain, Dark Funeral and Dimmu Borgir, has been the spearhead for bringing cock rock, gay rights emo, hardcore punk and even literally video game music into the black metal genre. I always knew that albums like "Rebel Extravaganza" would come to exist - I just never expected the well to be poisoned from within.
Ignore this turd, and focus on Darkthrone's first four (maybe five) releases. They, in addition to being good, are true black metal.
The Cult is Alive score: 55/100.
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