Cults at Brighton Music Hall, 9/22/22
Cults 9/22 at Brighton Hall
Ethan Lam comments on Cults’ sonically mature sounds and lush, lively and mysterious tracks after attending their most recent Boston show.
The sounds of indie pop diverged in the early 2010s. On one hand you had the scrappy, shiny, and unabashedly euphoric sonic signatures of bands such as Walk the Moon, Passion Pit, and Sleigh Bells; on the other, there was the brooding, melancholic, ethereal mood championed by artists and bands like Grimes, Phantogram, and The xx. The influence of both paths – but especially the latter – is apparent in much of today’s mainstream pop. It’s not hard to hear strands of it in the music of Billie Eilish, Phoebe Bridgers, Joji, etc.
NYC’s Cults, who burst onto the scene in 2011 with their self-titled debut, is a band from that somber-sounding camp, and rarely sees deserved mention in the annals of indie pop history. The wild success of early singles “Abducted,” “Go Outside,” and “You Know What I Mean” led them to sign with a major label, follow up Cults shortly thereafter with 2013’s Static, and then release Offering and Host in later years. The band has sadly since received diminished attention from both the music press and online indie music communities – which is a shame, because their most recent full-length album, 2020’s Host, sounds nothing short of incredible. By marrying their moody production and evocative lyrical style with a vastly expanded palette of instruments – horns, tambourines, and cymbals, just to name a few – the band managed to evolve their sound, becoming more rich and sonically mature while maintaining the essence of what made their music so captivating all those years ago.
Cults played a show at Brighton Music Hall to cap off their most recent tour. In fact, Boston served as both the starting and ending point for the tour as the band had kicked it off at Boston Calling earlier in May, a fact that keyboardist and guitarist Brian Oblivion made sure to point out. They kicked things off with “Trials,” the lead track from their latest album Host. Opening with a simulated violin section, “Trials” perfectly captures the newest iteration of the band’s sound – lush, lively, yet as murky and mysterious as the best Cults tracks are. They followed with “Spit You Out,” an uncharacteristically upbeat and bombastic song from the duo that benefited immensely from live instrumentation.
Given that Cults weren’t explicitly touring behind their last album Host, they dedicated a fair bit of the setlist to their extensive back catalog. “High Road,” “Offering,” and “You Know What I Mean” sounded as noisy, nocturnal, and stylish as ever, with Follin’s dusky echoed voice soaring atop the dreamy instrumentals.
Vocalist & guitarist Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion, the duo behind Cults, have been working together for over a decade at this point. Their tight-knit friendship was evident throughout the night, with the two constantly poking fun at and encouraging one another. As an example Oblivion brought the crowd’s attention to the fact that this was Follin’s first tour as a guitarist. Follin prefaced “Abducted,” a song with a rare vocal contribution from Oblivion, by asking the crowd if they “want[ed] to hear the voice of an angel” – when the song finished, she playfully remarked “Bad boy baritone Brian, everyone!”
Cults began to bring the show to a close with “No Risk” and “Shoulders to My Feet,” two songs from Host. “Shoulders to My Feet” was an unexpected highlight of the set, featuring an undulating alarm-sounding synth note in the background building an ominous tension that was the perfect foil to Follin’s gentle croon. The encore was comprised of two absolute classics: “Go Outside” – the song that introduced me to the band all those years ago as a teen in the mid 2010s – and of course, perennial favorite “Always Forever.” The band performs “Always Forever” a few notes lower live than they do on Static, but that only serves to lend a sense of maturity to the track.
Cults have been enjoying a resurgence as of late, their newfound popularity due in no small part to the influence of TikTok, as “Always Forever” from Static found new life as a viral sound on the app earlier in the year (funnily enough, during the process of me putting this review together, it’s happening again with “Gilded Lily” from 2017’s Offering.) The result was an oddly diverse crowd consisting of millennials in their late 30’s, who were there during the band’s early come-up, and college-age zoomers, who might have fallen in love with Cults through TikTok. Regardless of how the audience members found the band, their presence was proof enough that Cults still has so much left to give to the music world – here’s hoping that next time around, the band will be playing to the bigger crowds they so rightfully deserve at this stage in their career.