THE BEYOND

Cult of Luna's The Beyond doesn't deviate much from the pattern laid out on their debut: they play brutal hardcore doom, or 'sludge' as some clever brain once coined it. Heavily inspired (or rather copied) from Neurosis, it's a scene frequented by many bands in the 00's, but next to Isis, there's not much I would recommend, but CoL sure gave it their very best.

The band really went for it on this album succeeded now at what they tried to do on the debut. It's hard to pinpoint why but the intensity of the performance is quite remarkable. They lay down a huge wall of sound and the quality is high throughout, both in the dissonant riffing and in the heavy tread of the rhythm. A couple of laid-back post-rockisms provide an occasional resting point but mostly this album is in constant attack mode. It has a ridiculous length though. 75 minutes of this morose heaviness is simply too much.

Cult Of Luna have made an important step from sounding like a bunch of kids playing soldiers to the crushing war machine on this second album. They won't inspire me any time soon to endless flows of grandiloquent praise but with The Beyond they sure had a top quality album in their niche market. 3.5 stars