Band:	Cult Of Fire
Album:	Moksha
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	February 20, 2020
A review by:	Auntie Sahar

01. Zrození Výjimečného
02. Město Mrtvých
03. (ne)Čistý
04. Har Har Mahadev
05. Mok?a

Announcing a double album and then releasing it as two separate albums, each around 35 minutes in run time, certainly isn't the most ordinary way to break silence after nearly 7 years without any full length releases. But that clearly hasn't stopped Cult Of Fire from doing just that.

Most people probably know Cult Of Fire from their 2013 album with the Hindi title: an immersive, and widely acclaimed dive into a hypnotizing brand of black metal smothered in Vedic influences and Hindu mythology. Since then the Czech trio have more or less been following in a similar vein with subsequent releases, so much so that it can at times become difficult to discern the exact differences in songwriting and overall structure between one and the next. With Moksha Cult Of Fire don't appear to deviate from this established formula too noticeably, but their focus appears to be on a rather crunchier, riff centric approach. Barring the band's debut, this is quite possibly the heaviest they've sounded. This is speaking relatively, of course, as this album isn't "heavy" in a brutal death metal or sludge sense? but, nonetheless, repeated listens do seem to reveal an added emphasis on catchiness and the overall "weight" of the riffage, on tracks such as "Město Mrtvých" or "Har Har Mahadev" especially.

The thing is, this new emphasis seems to have come almost at the expense of the band's distinct, hypnotizing allure of earlier. Perhaps this is a somewhat minor complaint, as there are still elements on Moksha that help raise it ever so slightly on the "transcendent" scale? chants here, a melodic interlude there, perhaps a bit of tribal percussion in the background elsewhere. But these ingredients of Cult Of Fire's songwriting seem to be briefer and all around less sustained on this release, lessening their overall impact and even at times feeling somewhat forced. You can definitely feel this shift in the production as well, which, counter to the brighter, airy, and atmospheric feel of previous Cult Of Fire albums, comes off a lot denser and bass-heavy.

While definitely a tad catchier and head bobbing than some of the material preceding it, Moksha really seems to have turned down the knob on Cult Of Fire's epic factor, not necessarily removing that aspect of their sound entirely, but at the very least downgrading it considerably. While far from a bad release, it does come off as a slightly forgettable one, or rather one that doesn't hold up as well next to others in the Cult Of Fire discog such as our beloved, Hindi-titled one or the Life, Sex, And Death EP.



And that brings us to Nirvana?