I tried to review this album without mentioning Culted's geographically fascinating backstory, but the disconnect between the members (Three of whom reside in the remote Canadian prairies while vocalist Daniel Jansson lives in Gothenburg, Sweden. They have never met.) had such an impact on my interpretation of the album that I felt compelled to bring it up. Throughout the entirety of Oblique To All Paths I was unable to shake the feeling that Jansson's voice was like some terrible long-lost recorded artifact, and that the musicians had been tasked with writing an appropriately unsettling piece of music to accompany it, when in fact their recording process is quite the opposite way around.
Opener 'Brooding Hex' is a trial by fire, 20 minutes of slowly unfurling blackened doom which, as it leads you ever further down it's dark and crooked path, will utterly captivate you. Not through your own volition, you understand, more like the morbid curiosity which has people craning their necks for a better view of a particularly grisly crime scene. You'll be creeped out, uncomfortable, but you'll be damned if you can turn it off.
Both the instruments and vocals are swathed in layers of effects; the guitars can occasionally sound like the scraping of long-ossified bone on cracked concrete, the drums hit with all the impact of anti-materiel rounds fired into the hull of a rusted tanker, and the vocals sound like the last transmission of a man slowly bleeding to death in the middle of a frozen tundra. It is an unremittingly bleak collection of sounds, expertly fused to create an unpleasant but wholly immersive experience.
The track comes to a close with passages of maddening, spiralling guitar and harsh electronics that will make you feel as if your vitreous fluid has been replaced with battery acid. I would be genuinely surprised if anyone is able to listen through this whole album without needing to take a break more than a couple of times. Sombre piano jabs lead into 'Illuminati' which actually possesses something vaguely resembling traditional song structure, there's a riff and everything! It may be accompanied by more of Jansson's feral, cybernetic howls, but it's a riff nonetheless. However the following track, 'Intoxicant Immuration', contains no such concessions to structure; it's more akin to floating facedown in the slowly pooled blood of a thousand bathtub suicides.
By the time the album comes to the vaguely halfway point with 'March Of The Wolves', I feel utterly spent. Thankfully its another track with vaguely recognisable form: martial wardrums, blackened rasps and woozy, off-kilter riffs, all coming in at under 5 minutes long. Lovely.
A short intermission of desolate noise leads into 'Transmittal', which begins with sounds like the workings of some great machinery, all clanking, lurching dissonance. Among the black tremolo and funereal drums there are an endless minutiae that you'll be praying aren't just your imagination; glitches, echoes and indiscernible sampled snippets. The cumulative effect sounds simultaneously jagged and slithering, broken and ruined yet still cruelly efficient. As the track begins to shut itself down, the sequence counted down by double-kick and a sludgy riff, oscillating ever wilder, you'll dread what may come next.
Final track 'Jeremiad' begins with piston-like percussion and inhuman ranting, which is soon joined by a mournful guitar melody, and for the first time throughout the album you sense the disconnection between the two factions within the band. The relative lack of effects on the music here, contrasted with the heavily-distorted vocals serves to highlight the divide between the members, rather than mask it. However for the majority of the record, this is not as issue, and the whole disturbing thing sounds seamless.
With Oblique To All Paths, a title taken from a quote from occultist Austin Osman Spare, Culted fulfil their intention to "explore an artistic or philosophical path regardless of societal expectations". Whilst filtering elements of doom, black metal, industrial, noise and much more into their musical output, Culted sound completely unlike any other band. Follow down their dark path at your peril...
