Normally when exposed to someone with an unpalatable personality, you try to avoid any further contact with them. But when that someone is a popular musician, their negative qualities are often a source of fascination. As such, their music is treated as a case study – analysed for clues about the artist’s frame of mind as much as it is appreciated as an artistic document.
Hidden City is an album that can be critiqued through this psychoanalytic lens. Here, Cult frontman Ian Astbury exposes the insecurities that lie behind his cantankerous, cocksure facade. “I fell in a bathroom stall / 5am on the tiled floor / Twisted knife, the hooker smiles / When will it end?” begins In Blood. Through his strained, hoarse voice Astbury reveals his concerns at coming undone and being exposed as a flawed human.
The inclusion of piano drives home the sense that Astbury is presenting a naked version of himself. On Sound and Fury and Lilies, the instrument gives the songs a dark, vulnerable quality. It’s less aggressive than much of The Cult’s discography, which has been dominated by Billy Duffy’s guitar.
This is still a rock album, mind you. Far from taking a back seat, Duffy resumes his partnership/rivalry with Astbury to be the lead voice in The Cult. Astbury has lost the howling upper-reaches of his vocal range that characterised the band’s ‘80s heyday, but Duffy churns out chunky chords and open-D riffs as instinctively as ever, proving yet again he’s a criminally underrated guitar hero.
The guitar workouts on No Love lost, Dance the Night, Dark Energy and Hinterland will leave fans satisfied for another few years, while the chance to assess Astbury’s psyche makes Hidden City the most noteworthy Cult album of the past two decades.
BY ALEXANDER DARLING
