Cult Of Luna

Eternal Kingdom

[4.5/5]


While rehearsing in an erstwhile asylum in Umeå, Sweden, Cult Of Luna discovered Tales From The Eternal Kingdom, the fantastical ramblings of a mental patient who blames his wife’s death on scheming anthropomorphic animals and a Luciferian folkloric figure. Even without consulting the lyric sheet for this backstory or deciphering Klas Rydberg’s howls, listeners would know an epic saga was unfolding, just from the perfectly executed soft/loud dynamics. Cult Of Luna’s past few albums have contained plenty of slow-building crescendos and ambient tension, but Eternal Kingdom provides much heavier payoffs, with the group’s dual drummers and three guitarists unleashing massive torrents of sound. The album’s quieter passages, such as the lucid, psychedelic pockets of “Ghost Trail,” communicate mournful emotion and mystical intrigue, rather than simply serving as the absence-of-noise complement to the climaxes. Using unorthodox instrumentation (trumpet fanfare, marching-band snares) and distortion pedals that render notes so encased in feedback they land with fuzzy thuds, this octet inflate themselves to a full orchestra. When Rydberg screams in convincing anguish over all these evocative, baleful symphonies, it’s easy to forget that this doomed-prisoner story isn’t an autobiography. (EARACHE) Andrew Miller

ROCKS LIKE:

Isis’ Panopticon

Neurosis’ Times Of Grace

The Mars Volta’s The Bedlam In Goliath

IN-STORE SESSION WITH GUITARIST JOHANNES PERSSON

Eternal Kingdom adapts its storyline from Tales From The Eternal Kingdom, a journal you found at your rehearsal space, a former mental institution. Did you have any music written when you discovered the journal?

No, not at all. We found the journal about a year ago in a box, which also contained medical records and old newspapers. We didn’t start writing the album until months later. That building has a dark history. We saw these things that looked like medieval torture equipment, like they would strap hysterical patients into this swing and push it around until they fainted.

This is the first time we’ve had the story before we started writing. When you get an amazing story like this falling in your lap, you don’t have much of a choice. What you read in the lyrics is, like, 75 percent true-from the diary-and 25 percent us. Sometimes [the lyrics don’t] make that much sense, because the man clearly was not sane, so we had to bend the story a bit. We translated the story into musical notes and dynamics. For example, with “The Lure,” there’s this mythological creature, the Necken, who’s, like, an incarnation of Satan. He would play his fiddle in the creek and lure women to their deaths. Holger Nilsson, who wrote the journal, was sentenced for drowning his wife in the creek, but he blamed the Necken. “The Lure” is how the Necken’s song might have sounded.

Eternal Kingdom sounds significantly heavier than your past few albums. Is that because the journal describes such a violent world?

Even before we found the journal, we had already decided that we’d taken this post-rock thing as far as we could. That whole scene is starting to get very predictable. Stagnation, in my eyes, is the death of music. We made a conscious decision to get heavier.

Some people feel internet distribution devalues cohesive albums. Given that Eternal Kingdom is both lyrically and musically sequential, are you concerned that listeners might experience it in a way that compromises that structure?

The album [already] leaked, and that pisses me off. If I get a hold of the person who feels that he has the right to take the music that we have put hundreds of hours of work into and spread it in shit quality without the proper context, that person would be sent to the hospital. It’s not a money issue, not at all-we hardly earn any money from the music, anyway. It’s about the fact that as artists, we should be able to dictate the context in which our art is experienced. Cult Of Luna are always about more than just the music. [AM]