Right before the release of their fourth full length album, Cult of Luna is touring Europe as a headliner once more. Since I also reviewed the album, I was no more than decent to visit the show, and of course to conduct an interview.
Fear Falls Burning:
To be honest I had no idea what either of the opening acts were gonna sound like. But this one immediately appealed to me, since it was kind of a one man version of Sunn 0))) combined with some Jesu, two acts I highly appreciate. Guitar drones were the main ingredient for this show, accompanied by a lot of spacey effects. Half the time it seemed like the dude wasn’t even doing anything except dozing of in his own tripping sounds, but that’s not a problem because I was dong exactly the same. A pretty nice, but short show, that wasn’t appreciated by everyone in the crowd. Fuck em!
Amen Ra:
The name of this band sounded familiar to me, I had the distinct feeling that there is a hip hop artist named just like that. But this was nothing like that. Doom-like postcore with a lot of metalcore and screamy vocals where what Amen Ra was all about. Unfortunately I didn’t’see the entire show because I had to do my interview. I did get a slight impression of where they were going though. The riffs were all right, but the songs didn’t grab me as much as some postcore bands are able to. Mainly the drumming and singing were not on a level where I could appreciate them. The vocalist had a very high pitched voice, and that was about all that I had seen him do. The drummer lacked in skill, therefore he didn’t take advantage of the oceans of space this type of music has in the area of drumming. Too bad.
Cult Of Luna:
The band had to do without their main vocalist this tour, since he had recently become a father. So this time there were only six people on stage, but in a different formation then when I saw them last time. Three guitar players, a bassist, drummer and an electronics dude was the line-up. They started of with the first song of the upcoming album; “Marching To The Heartbeats”, which starts rather quiet with emo vocals, later on becoming quite intense. The emphasis was on the quieter parts this evening, with some occasional brutal eruptions, where one of the guitarist filled in for the scream vocals. An other guitarist sang the emo vocals.
The entire set was very atmospheric but yet very intense. Overwhelming is perhaps a big word, but it came quite close to that.
The musical expertise in this band really comes forward on stage as well, you see a drummer handling his kit with ease and beating it with great power, while four people handle guitars as a whole, supported by a very enthusiastic electronics guy. All together creating fantastic compositions, that by now have a very secure place in the music industry. Lets hope they can continue with this for a very long time!
But I have to get something of my chest about them, something guitarist Erik mentioned earlier. They’re trying to approach the indie crowd more than the metal crowd lately, and when holding that in mind you get an entire different view on this band. When you listen to the riffs, you can clearly hear that typical indie guitar touch to it. When you can imagine all the songs a bit faster, you actually have some very catchy riffs I’d say. So I hereby want to dub their music as a new genre; post-indie. Hahaha, sounds interesting doesn’t it!
