Exclusive Track Premiere: Cult Burial’s “Vincula”
Beseech thee!
On September 5, London-based duo Cult Burial will release their third independent LP Collapse of Pattern, Reverence of Dust. Equally cohesive sonically and narratively, Collapse of Pattern… chronicles the stages of decay and decomposition through dissonant blackened death metal compositions that connect, disconnect, and reconnect in kind. This is “a record about erosion,” one that “sits between aggression and despair, weight and absence.” It thus cleaves in both senses. It a story about how lives and worlds are split asunder and also about how individuals and groups attempt to remain united, adhered or otherwise still attached. That impossible space, where “cleave” cleaves in a Moebius moment of self-intersection, self-penetration, self-fissure, is where Cult Burial resides. Sharp and precarious, a balancing act of patience and fortitude.
Thus far, we’ve heard lead singles “Collapse” and “Beseech.” The latter is short and punchy, “a supplication for a brief respite / in a life of eternal torment.” Listeners will certainly be reminded of Ulcerate and Suffering Hour, as the song excels in a muscular kind of dissonance. “Collapse” is darker and murkier, a longer foray into the process of collapse and our response to it. Doomy atmospheres expand and twisting riffs contract in a painfully aerobic exercise: “breathe in, exhale, repeat—collapse.”
Today, we’re thrilled to bring you an exclusive stream of third single and opening track “Vincula.” César Moreira’s guttural howl towers over Simon Langford’s composition. For all the wrack and ruin of the track’s bleak assault, there are hints and traces of a puzzling but comfortable warmth. The band moves through each passage with an ease that belies that intricacy of the track. About the song, the band has this to say:
‘Vincula’ is titled after the Latin for bonds, and the lyrics revolve around those bonds unraveling—mentally, inwardly. The song starts with structure and gradually disintegrates—verse, chorus, then gradual instrumental descent. It’s the collapse of all that had structure: dreams, self, meaning. But even in devastation, there is opposition. It’s agony that refuses to release—a state of arrested combat. There is refusal to stop, and that just flows right into the next song on the album.
“The Religion of an Oath, ” writes Ralph Cudworth in 1678, “is a Necessary Vinculum of Civil Society.” Similarly, George Grote, in 1876’s Fragments on Ethical Subjects, tells us, “Intimate connection drives us to conceive an ideal vinculum.” It is these various breaking bonds, these cleaving vincula that expand from our internal arrangements and stories we tell ourselves through interpersonal links between individuals to the shared fantasies, ideas, beliefs, and bases for reality that are meant to form cohesive, manageable, and stable societies, that Cult Burial rightly document as dissolved, devastated, and destroyed. “Vincula” sets the tone for an album that takes as its task the difficult work of making sense of the unmaking of meaning. But if—and, Cult Burial understands this perfectly—”the vincula of the Intellectual World are principally formulas of invocation” and thus nothing more than appeal conjuration, or supplication, what, precisely, can our faith be in those supposedly unbreakable bonds that are all the time either coming undone or being ripped apart? How does one keep going? On what basis? This is why we might revere dust. Scattered eternally to the winds yet collected together just enough to maintain some sense of unity or identity, dust remains. It comes after collapse. It rises, disperses, adheres, settles. Here is the crux of “Vincula” and the album as a whole. Click below.
Collapse of Pattern, Reverence of Dust
arrives September 5. Beautiful vinyl and CDs
can be ordered via bandcamp.
