A SCENE IN RETROSPECT: Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas – “Mariner”

‘The album as a whole feels like a vivid trek out from this particular time and space, existing solely within the confines of itself yet offering multiple dimensions to explore.‘

-Eeli Helin

Release date: April 8, 2016 | Indie Recordings | Cult of Luna Facebook | Instagram | Website | Julie Christmas Instagram

Collaborative records carry a certain level of risk and reward; in the case of Swedish veterans Cult of Luna and Battle of Mice/Made Out Of Babies vocalist Julie Christmas, the risk was taken and highly rewarded with the creation of a now legendary post-metal record that’s beloved far beyond the confines of the subgenre. Mariner continues to brave the tides of time with grace and courage, standing dignified amongst its peers.

Putting on any post-metal album is the equivalent of flipping a coin, in which you have a 50/50 chance of the album being immediately forgettable or being something really special. Being the post-metal icons that Cult of Luna are, anything they release might as well be a coin flip landing vertically in terms of defying all preconceived odds and expectations from the typical ‘post-metal coin flip’ that I just mentioned. Going even further than all that, we have the existence of Mariner, featuring the enigmatic Julie Christmas. This seemingly unlikely collaboration has the musical collective vertically landing another coin on top of an already vertically upright coin that is the rest of CoL’s discography, all on the very first try. Against all odds for a feat of this magnitude, they executed it flawlessly, as if it were just another Tuesday to them.

There is much to be said about this amorphous subgenre and how it refuses to adopt conventional song structures and norms, with musical ‘fortune’ (not speaking financially of course) favoring the bold. The common pitfall is that often songs devolve into meaningless musical meanderings, where the commonly heard phrase ‘it’s all about the journey, not the destination’ tragically fails to be relevant. It is no easy task to conceive a singular piece of music bearing little repetition from a compositional perspective, which is both adventurous and capable of sticking with the listener indefinitely, even after the first listen; now try a whole album of that. Cult of Luna never have and likely never will misstep in that regard, as dramatically emphasized earlier, everything they do is somberly cinematic and musically transcendental.

Simply attempting to describe the tapestry of sounds captured on Mariner to someone completely unaware of this album/band/genre would most definitely garner some concerned looks your way.  Hell, with how irreproducible and disturbingly feral Christmas’s unique vocal style is, I can’t even convince myself that this album will be as good as it is on paper, yet I press play and the magic, er, I mean music, speaks for itself and proves me oh so wrong. Literally everything is done to absolute perfection, so meticulously crafted and arranged, making for an unforgettable listening experience that no one else will be able to replicate. To this day, the final movement of “Cygnus” (and the album) never fails to send chills up my spine that are as powerful as the first time I heard it years ago.

What makes this album so effective is that it is constant push-and-pull between dissonance and consonance, with Christmas’s blood-curdling shrieks to her hauntingly mysterious, yet oddly comforting whisper vocals, or from thunderous riffs and chord progressions to lusciously thick atmospheric sections that build into immensely satisfying musical climaxes. I suppose you could say this about any of their albums, although Mariner pushes it to another musical dimension with Julie Christmas’ terrifying aura. It captures the cosmic horror of being trapped while exploring outer space, while simultaneously capturing the humbling wonder of the great beyond, reminding you/I of how insignificant we all are in the grand scheme of things.

If it wasn’t already obvious, Mariner is very highly regarded, not just by me and the other writers in this feature, but broadly across the post metal community for very good reason. I consider it to be the peak of the ‘post-metal with expected vocal collaboration’ holy trinity, with the other two albums being Converge & Chelsea Wolfe’s Bloodmoon: I and Thou & Emma Ruth Rundle’s May Our Chambers Be Full. It is these types of creatively daring works that yields the most satisfying payoffs as a listener. Keep ‘em coming!

When Mariner came out, I couldn’t actually connect with it immediately.

I was 100% into prog metal then, and most post metal still didn’t really click with me in a meaningful way. But of course the Mariner hype flew around my bubble. It felt like everyone was talking about it, so I did check it out. Big riffs, spacey vibe, and some very unhinged female vocals? I did enjoy it better than most post-metal I’ve heard until that point, but it didn’t feel like it was my thing, you know?

Fast-forward a few years, and I did come to appreciate more within the genre. And so I came back to Mariner, hoping it would hit different. Oh boy, did it.

Mariner is one of those works where the sum is greater than its parts. This goes far beyond just a collaboration between Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas. It’s like their musical DNA was fused to create a single entity which would become Mariner. Cult of Luna, as much as I love them, could never have achieved something like this album on their own or with anyone else. Julie Christmas is the life and soul of Mariner, and her trademark unhinged delivery in this album is what I’d consider one of the greatest vocal performances of all time. She elevates what would be an awesome record to an absolute landmark in heavy music. This is why I’m very happy that Cult of Luna doesn’t play this music live without Julie. It would just be wrong on every level.

It feels like people slap the word ‘atmospheric’ for loads of music (myself included), but this is an album that actually deserves that moniker. I’ve honestly never heard an album that is as atmospheric and enthralling as this. It may sound cliché, but Mariner is indeed a musical journey, both in its concept and how it captures the viewer.

I’ve always been fascinated by how science fiction media can imagine outer space. I feel like it falls into one of two approaches: vast, dreamlike, unexplored space. The next threshold for human kind to explore. On the other hand, you have the dangerous, predatory, ironically claustrophobic space. The fear of the unknown, and the realization that the universe is far greater than us and holds things not tailored for the human mind to comprehend. All common concepts within books, movies and whatnot, but not really that common of a topic for music.

The journey that Mariner takes its listener on is more like the latter. Conceptually and vibe-wise, it manages to capture so many of the feelings you’d find within the works of scifi authors like Arthur C. Clarke and HP Lovecraft. It’s a journey that feels grand yet personal, in which the vastness of space feels almost palpable. Other bands, such as Blood Incantation and LLNN, also delved in sci-fi themes and topics, but none managed to grasp an authentic feeling to it as much as Mariner does.

From the very start of the looming intro of “A Greater Call” all the way into the mesmerizing outro of “Cygnus”, one thing is always clear for me: I’m not just putting some music in the background; I’m having a fantastic journey within Mariner again. It feels like an actual story more than any conceptual prog album I’ve ever heard. I can’t even fathom the idea of not listening to this album in order, from beginning to end.

Mariner is not just my golden standard for post-metal, it’s one of the albums that showed me how impactful music can be. I’ll cherish its existence forever.

Another day, another life, a lifetime ago. I had discovered Cult of Luna some time prior, and was quite obsessive over them for a long while, doing everything in my power to find physical editions of their releases, seeing them live, writing music like theirs, all that. Cult of Luna has always had a singular sound, as bands pioneering entire genres often do, yet they’ve evolved with every album to some direction, with each of them representing their own angle in the band’s thorough discography. While the likes of Neurosis and Isis are always mentioned when post-metal as a whole is brought up, the sentence wouldn’t be complete without the Swedish juggernaut.

When the news broke that a new collaboration album with one Julie Christmas is imminent, and not having heard of her before, I had no idea what to anticipate. Even though I was pretty damn sure that more good times are ahead, I didn’t expect the game changer that Mariner proved out to be.

The tandem of massive walls of sound and delicate brooding quietness has probably never been as pristine as on Mariner, all things considered. The production makws every last detail shine out in their own right, and the sonic tapestry is unfathomably colossal in scope. This obviously makes sense in context, the central theme of the album being about abandoning Earth and steering beyond the unknown, which acts as both a literal and a metaphorical narrative. The album as a whole feels like a vivid trek out from this particular time and space, existing solely within the confines of itself yet offering multiple dimensions to explore.

The story tells that while Cult of Luna had this very clear vision of the mentioned voyage into space, Julie Christmas was given free reign of her lyrics and vocal parts, which then turned out to be the more grounding and humane elements here. It’s like parallel storytelling with echoes from the everyday past being met with something much more sci-fi and extraordinary, creating a very complex and thorough structure that has something for everyoneto cling on to. It’s worth mentioning that Christmas’s voice, albeit from an entirely different realm, fits Cult of Luna’s sound like a great thing fitting another, well, great thing.

Mariner did harness a lot of exposure when it came out thanks to all of the above and more, hence it’s not a surprise that the collaboration is alive still today, in multiple ways. Mariner has been performed live occasionally, and CoL’s vocalist/guitarist Johannes joined Julie Christmas’s own band since. The collision of these distinct worlds has rarely felt so good, and it’s not a surprise that a lotof people have been asking for a sequel, and I wouldn’t be against that either.

‘The stars will not guide us, close your eyes, embrace the darkness.‘