YATIN DAWRA

Inspired  by the cult film Metropolis, as the band claimed in an interview, the album quite explicitly packs a sound of the future, with not only frequent use of samples but also with Anders Teglund, the band's sample generator and synthesizer, throwing in an entire section of the bass wobble (Dub-wub-wub) on the mammoth 19-minute track 'Vicarious Redemption'. The powerful imagery on the album has as its tool the careful sequencing of the tracks, with songs like 'The One' and 'The Sweep', despite their distant placement, humming the same tune, imposing a strong emotive background for the theme of the album.

With Vertikal, Cult of Luna go back to painting a macroscopic picture (as they did in their earlier releases of The Beyond and Salvation), with the sound on the album carrying an influx of dystopia; and added to that is the ringing of the explosions of the war preceding it. And with its constantly morphing landscape, there is no doubt regarding their accomplishment of this masterpiece.

The band effectively, apart from the lyrics, uses its atmospherics to colour the epoch of a transitory period: Beginning with a drier air across the first half of the album with tracks like 'I: Weapon ', Vertikal acquires moisture as the album progresses. The wind keeps getting cooler with the gloomy lullaby 'Disharmonia', after which 'In Awe Of' embarks the onset of the storm with its opening riff. The storm, since we're sticking to the metaphor, unleashes itself with full force with 'The Flow Reversed', as the album finally culminates into a dead silence, which every listener should sit with for a while at least, in order to absorb the entirety of what the senses just witnessed. This is indeed one of the band's best albums so far.