I’ve been listening to this album for a while now with a view to penning my review, and while I’ve found it an engaging listen, something’s been niggling at me from the get-go. The trouble is, that ‘something’ isn’t easy to define. At first, I found myself wrestling with terminologies and genre categorisations for the music on ‘Love Will Prevail’.
It’s angry music, evocative of clenched fists, strikes and long cold winters on the dole. Built around clumping rhythms, tightly-wound acoustic guitars strummed with bleeding fingers and gruff vocals dispatching bitter indictments on the evils of mankind while harking back to a golden bygone age, ‘Love Will Prevail’ is not a contemporary sounding album, and it by no means captures the zeitgeist. Or maybe it does, far more than the electro revival, in that it captures the spirit of the 80s – not the yuppies and the power-dressing, but the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the disillusioned.
The brass-soaked opener, ‘Man and Man’s Ruin’ is deceptively and uncharacteristically upbeat in the context of the album as a whole, a slice of indie-folk with a funk-edged bass that turns angry in the third verse and delivered with considerable urgency. More representative, the heavy martial rhythm of ‘Garden of Delights’ carries a bleak and angry atonal guitar that’s the perfect foil for Sean Ragon’s embittered lyrics. ‘Path of Total Freedom’ has a crusty folk hue about it, while ‘The Gateway’ intimates a sound closer to a lighter version of Killing Joke.
As such, all of this appeals to me. So what was bugging me? It took me a while to realise that there’s something in Cult of Youth’s sound that’s distinctly neofolk. In singing the glories of man’s pre-Christian heritage on tracks like ‘New Old Ways’ ‘Golden Age’ and ‘A New Way’, Cult of Youth are tapping into a musical vein that sits on dodgy ground. There’s nothing overtly problematic in the lyrics – ‘Garden of Delights’ ostensibly attacks hatred, evil and fascism – the martial undercurrents and imagery are unsettling, corresponding as they do with the quasi-mystical occultism that pervades the works of the genre’s most politically dubious exponents.
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Ragon may be on record denouncing fascism, but he also acknowledged in an interview with Stereogum that fascism is to industrial / postindustrial / neofolk what sex is to rock ‘n’ roll, stating “Industrial music is music of the mind, whereas rock and roll is music of the body. It's all pornography. Fascism is a forbidden philosophy, and forbidden philosophies titillate the mind in the same way that dirty pictures titillate the body.” Such comments certainly don’t help to distance him or CoY from unsavoury aesthetics.
Still, without any real evidence, it would be wrong to assume that Ragon – and by that token, his music, his band – is anything more than is presented as being on face value. ‘Love Will Prevail’ is a bold and powerful album that’s bursting with anger and conviction.
Cult of Youth Online
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