The Cult: Beyond Good And Evil : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The prospects of a Cult comeback sure didn't look good. Brit expats Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy hadn't recorded an album together in seven years, their last two records stunk, and the odds were pretty high that a new-millennium return from an Eighties band stuck in the Seventies would wallow in nostalgia. But Beyond Good and Evil shakes with vitality. Astbury's still got his cat-on-a-hot-tin-Zeppelin wail. Duffy still piles on the God-given riffs. Yet there's a sweetness and a depth to tuneful tracks such as "Nico" that the Cult never achieved during their peak of sanctuary-selling fire women and love-removal machines. And when Astbury sneers at today's neo-metal pretenders on "Ashes and Ghosts," Duffy, Matt Sorum and friends back up his attack with awe-inspiring authority. No trends are swallowed whole, no commercially proven cameos spew from hot young things. The record rocks, and that alone is good.