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I called The Lion's Daughter's last album, Existence Is Horror, "full-bore blackened sludge." Their newest, Future Cult, is built on the same foundation, but with a new twist: synths!
I will admit upfront that, because I am an old, I often equate heavy synths automatically with 80s music. Fair is fair, a lot of interesting things have been done since that time in terms of electronic music, but that tends to be my basic starting point. With that admission out of the way, I think The Lion's Daughter is definitely borrowing on a bit of 80s nostalgia here. A lot's been said about the slightly-modern-yet-still-retro soundtrack of the hit show Stranger Things. If you've seen that show, I dare you to listen to "Call the Midnight Animal" and NOT think of Eleven traveling to the upside-down to fight monsters. In fact, I think "Call the Midnight Animal" would make a better soundtrack to that show's boss battles, given the ferocity of the hardcore-blackened-prog-sludge that underlies the mean-sounding arcade game synth riff the song is built on.
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| The Lion's Daughter 2016. Photos © John Mourlas. All rights reserved. |
For fans of the band's previous work, I think Future Cult could be a love-it-or-hate-it kind of album. I've seen a few grumblings about it being a "mix of synthwave and plodding hardcore." But even if this new layer to the band's sound isn't to everyone's taste, I think comments like that are overly dismissive. The band hasn't just slapped synths on top of the template from their last album. Basic sonic similarities aside, they've let some of these songs breathe a bit. "The Gown" mixes in a heavy dose of eerie atmosphere with a slower-burning doom feel. I'll admit that this doesn't always work--I think a couple of tracks, including "Grease Infant," fail to build up the necessary momentum for what the band's going for here.
A few missteps aside, though, this is still a tight album at 37 minutes, and if you dug the band's last album, you owe it to yourself to give this one a fair spin. If the band had just redone Existence Is Horror with the chords in a different order, we'd all be bored, but they've taken a somewhat-risky step out into potentially more interesting waters. I'll be curious to see if, down the road, we look back on this as a bit of a transitional album on the band's part, moving into a sonic area that they may not have fully under their control yet. But even so, I think this album still stands on its own as another solid entry in their discography.