Perhaps the biggest shake-up, this album features chord progressions that actually, uh, progress. Their arrangements have also grown to define individual songs in critical but non-focal ways, with keyboards playing a constant role on the periphery and upper-range guitars accentuating key moments more nimbly than ever. This is neither as original nor as beguiling as the similarly destitute Somewhere Along The Highway, but it does at least sound more frostbitten than anything else in the band’s repertoire. It’s less contingent on the intensity of individual moments, benefitting more from a pervasive atmosphere of the risky-wilderness-journey variety. The Long Road North is a more sophisticated record than A Dawn to Fear, and Cult of Luna’s reputation for steely competence is quite at home in its various details and refinements. That established, let’s talk about small blessings. Album-of-the-moment The Long Road North fits so naturally into the band’s recent progression (read: chronological sequence of releases) that I struggle just as much to imagine anyone greeting it with disappointment as I do to see them being galactically impressed by it. We heard this templated on 2019’s A Dawn to Fear, tweaked on last year’s The Raging River, and ‘tis now the hour for round three. They exploited this rather successfully on 2013’s Vertikal, but their releases since have been defined more by commonalities than points of mutual distinction. Hold those horses: at this point their sound and formula are so genre-encapsulating (read: heavily predictable) that even the most minor departure feels like a colossal twist. If their audience transcends the label, so must their music, etc. 1234567890billionĬult of Luna are practically the only active post-metal band with significant reach outside the genre (sorry, Amenra), an accolade frequently complicit with an illusory sense that they do something their contemporaries aren’t up for. Review Summary: Dark Side of the Moon pt.
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