The Cult is one of those bands that have enjoyed just the right level of success, producing innovative records that were both commercially and critically successful.
The band initially defined themselves as a post-punk band in the early 1980’s enjoying significant success with singles such as ‘She Sells Sanctuary’ achieving enormous popularity.
Choice of Weapon is their first album since 2007’s Born Into This and continues the theme of the band forgoing their post-punk origins for what could be described as more of a hard-rock alignment.
Moving back to their original line-up, The Cult have produced ten tracks of straight-up rock and roll, delivering screaming lead guitars and bellowing vocals from frontman Ian Astbury.
Despite Astbury announcing that Choice of Weapon could be “one of our best records, maybe the best” his sentiments unfortunately don’t quite correlate with what the band have managed to deliver on this album.
Despite hard-hitting rock songs like ‘Lucifer’ and ‘The Wolf’ delivering The Cult’s signature hook-driven leads atop a foundation of thundering overdrive chord progressions, the album’s overall impression is somewhat thin.
Audacious vocal melodies are undermined by bereft lyrical sentiments, with even titles like ‘Life > Death’ failing to deliver anything overtly inspiring in what could have been a very eminent chorus, with politically potent themes throughout the album seeming lifeless and feigning idealism.
Ultimately The Cult have delivered an album of simplistic background rock, with a few redeeming moments in tracks like ‘A Pale Horse’ invoking minor instances of foot-stomping.
But it still feels like it’s nothing more than the best of a bad bunch, with the album falling short of delivering something innovative and inspiring, which really isn’t an unreasonable expectation from a band with such a prolific history.
-Morgan Benson
