Someone needs to pay for Culted to play: In a recent interview, guitarist Michael Klassen suggested that the international quintet of doom metal reprobates would consider stepping onto a stage if they were presented with the proper opportunity. The admission represents a significant advance for Culted, not only because the band has never performed live but also because four of its members have never even met Daniel Jansson, the rather threatening Gothenburg vocalist who happens to be the quintet’s lead singer. After an EP and two LPs, including the sprawling new Oblique to All Paths, the band’s Canadian contingent have only e-mailed and exchanged files with Jansson. It’s a great press hook, sure, an audible manifestation of the way technology leapfrogs geographical and pragmatic barriers; Culted is the heavy metal equivalent of the Foreign Exchange or the Postal Service, bands whose own long-distance relationships abetted the mystique of their output. But after seven years, the real-time divide has at last become a hindrance for Culted’s music, a barrier to the cohesion and power of their audacious mix of doom and drone, death metal and sludge, harsh noise and field recordings. Oblique to All Paths is one of the most willfully eclectic metal records you’ll hear all year; from end to end, however, it might be one of the least impactful, too.
Culted comes from a moment of mere synchronicity. Klassen was listening to new CDs with a friend many years ago when one from Jansson’s vile solo project, Deadwood, registered with him. He kept the disc, found the singer on MySpace, and asked if he’d contribute to a project. Jansson agreed, and through continued discussion, the pair soon determined that this would be no one-off exchange: Distance be damned, they wanted to start a proper band, and they wanted to return to the primeval thrall of doom. Released in rather quick succession, Culted’s first two outings start with that premise, pitting riffs that crackle and undulate with drums that loom and lunge against webs of noise and moments of misdirection. It’s charged and well-built stuff, with the idiosyncrasies of the relationship and the band’s post-metal impulses mostly folded into the music’s forward thrust.
But one need only to scan the tracklist to understand that Oblique to All Paths marks a move from that relatively basic past toward full-on grandiosity: The album’s first track, “Brooding Hex”, is the longest piece in the Culted catalogue by seven minutes. A short sample-based interlude excepted, each of these seven tracks alloys several subgenres, from the militantly moribund black metal lyrics to the space-rock echoes of the record’s crown jewel, “Transmittal”. What’s more, these 62 minutes barely stop, with almost every track threaded together by the steel ropes of feedback, loops and guitar decay.
That segue-centric approach epitomizes Culted’s biggest hurdle: Though their most basic building blocks are excellent (their doom is frightening, their noise claustrophobic), their construction is often faulty or, at best, plainly unaccomplished. Jansson’s voice, for instance, is a versatile menace, capable of serving as stentorian overlord or subversive accompaniment. Too often, though, he sounds as though he’s trying to carve his sound into the intimidating mass of what the band has already made. These are complicated maneuvers, and his attempts to shoehorn his way into them often only crowd the space. “Brooding Hex” is a captivating 12-minute doom expanse that lingers for nearly twice as long as needed; late into the number, Culted adds a devilish carousel melody beneath the din, as if to register a latent interest in prog. That moment senesces into a five-minute, slow-motion fadeaway, a clichéd footnote that could be crossed out without harm.
But then, of course, Culted might be compelled to write a substantive transition into “Illuminati”, a momentary sonic smear that soon crashes into a clash between doom, stoner rock, and noise-rock. The misdirected meters and mutating guitar tones delight, but again, Culted follows the need to make it something more, to route the squall through Pink Floyd circuits and into the next number. Yet again, “Intoxicant Immuration” rises through a gray haze of bleak static, hangman guitars, and sampled voices. Culted eventually burst back into a beat, the riffs riding alongside Jansson’s invective. Just when momentum starts to build, Culted pushes it aside, lazily skipping into the next mold instead of shifting between them. The band either lacks the compositional wherewithal to make these pieces fit together like a monstrous symphony, or their transcontinental approach to writing and recording forces them to pile more parts atop the weak links, rather than fight about how best to fix the faults. Oblique to All Paths often sags and sometimes breaks, moves that instantly sap the drive from the marathon.
Despite its problems, Oblique to All Paths is the kind of commendable idea that feels like a way forward. Though the Body’s own backstory of tour vans and DIY spaces could barely be more different than that of Culted, they share a same wide-angle, no-limits definition of doom. They’ve got company, too—Gnaw, Ash Borer, Cultus Sabbati, to name a few. But of all these bands, Culted seems perhaps the most open to everything, the most ready to spin a monolith of amplifier hum against D-beat or to route lyrical black metal harangues through truly destructive circuits. But as that experimental willpower grew between Culted’s first two releases and Oblique to All Paths, their ability to control it and consolidate all those impulses decreased.
Oblique to All Paths suggests a possibly important transition for Culted, then: Either the distance between the members stand, and they master all the strains of their sound from afar or simply become overwhelmed by them. But with the heightened spotlight and the general intrigue of this project, perhaps these five musicians can find the right touring situation, wrestle with these monsters somewhere in a room, and emerge with a better collective sense of energy and editing. The pieces are here, but they’re not close enough to fit quite yet.
