Post-Metal's Nordic Model: "Leave Me Here" by Cult of Luna
Drumming Upstream 17
Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! I am learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. After I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 463 songs left!
This week I’ve learned “Leave Me Here” by the Swedish metal band Cult of Luna, as originally played by Thomas Hedlund. You might be more familiar with Hedlund than you’d expect if you happen to be a fan of French indie rock or worked in retail after 2009, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Now, onto “Leave Me Here”.
Side A
“Leave Me Here”
By Cult of Luna
Salvation
Released on October 4th, 2004
Liked on January 1st, 2016
In the last entry of Drumming Upstream I described how my hometown of Brooklyn, NY developed a serious crush on a controversial subgenre of heavy metal from Oslo, Norway. I had a dalliance with Norwegian black metal too, albeit a few years before the rest of the borough caught on. I’m not bragging by the way, there’s nothing impressive about having an internet connection and getting briefly obsessed with black metal at age 16. But I was never a die hard for the Norwegian scene. Even during that fling my heart belonged to a different part of Scandinavia. Like an advocate for nationalized healthcare in search of a good example, I only had eyes for Sweden.
Whether by dint of actual government funding for their arts programs or simply having to spend a lot of time indoors to escape the cold, Sweden has produced a staggering amount of good music. Not just good, but important music too. Though more commonly celebrated in the states for their contributions to pop, since the 1990s the Swedes have had an equally outsized influence on American heavy metal. I can name three entire scenes of American metal, days worth of music and hundreds of bands between them, whose entire output was made possible by a single Swedish band each.1 When it comes to music, the Nordic model has been a rousing success in the U.S. of A.
This makes it all the more noteworthy that the first thing I knew about Cult of Luna is that they stood accused of having ripped off an American band. The same summer that my friend let me listen to Isis on his iPod while killing time at camp, that same friend let me read a copy of Alternative Press Magazine he received in the mail. I had never heard of AP before. They were celebrating their 20th anniversary. Trent Reznor was on the cover. Only a few pages past the table of contents sat an interview with Aaron Turner, the singer and guitarist of Isis. According to Turner, a member of Cult of Luna told him at a show that he, the Cult member, had never heard Isis before. Incredulous, Turner replied to AP “Yeah? Well, whoever wrote the riffs on your album did!”
I’m not here to adjudicate ancient claims of swagger jacking. Whether Cult of Luna were inspired by Isis or not didn’t matter to me that summer, and it matters even less to me now. What matters is that for as long as I’ve known that Cult of Luna existed I’ve known them to exist in tandem with Isis. If Turner intended to denigrate Cult of Luna in this interview he failed spectacularly. Instead he’d just given me, a brand new fan of his band, a roadmap to find more where that came from.
That map took me to Umeå, Sweden. Well, this being 2005 it took me to Cult of Luna’s MySpace page which is where I learned that the band were from Umeå, Sweden. If the comparison to Isis hadn’t sold me, this bit of geographical trivia pushed me over the age. Sweden hadn’t done me wrong yet. I scrolled down and hit play on the music video for “Leave Me Here”, sat back, and let the music speak for itself.
From a distance, Cult of Luna’s early career resembles an avalanche. Separate pieces of debris from other bands in the Umeå hardcore punk scene join together to form a supersized six person lineup. Their politics stay anti-authoritarian but they let samples of Noam Chomsky do the talking over their increasingly instrumental songs. As the band gain momentum, their radius expands. 2001’s self tilted full length sounds like the most exciting band out of Umeå. Two years later on The Beyond they sounded like one of the best new bands from Sweden. By 2004’s Salvation Cult of Luna were the best band of their kind in Europe.
But which kind of band is that exactly? Three albums in they barely resembled the hardcore scene that birthed them. The band, now seven members, were signed to Earache Records, a British label known for its European death metal records, but that description didn’t fit Cult of Luna either. As one Rate Your Music user put it in a review of Salvation from 2005: “Not death metal, not quite doom, what is it? Who knows.” Another user added in 2006 “Isis 2.0?”
I pointedly avoided ascribing a genre to Isis when I wrote about them earlier in this series. When I first heard them I had no preconceptions about what box they belonged in. I just experienced the music for what it was. Cult of Luna of changed that. Their very existence retrofitted Isis from an anomaly to the spearhead of a movement. Every movement needs a name and “sounds like Isis” wasn’t going to cut it.
The term we settled on was “Post Metal”. The reasoning was bands like Isis and Cult of Luna were doing to heavy metal what Mogwai and Tortoise were doing to rock music in general. There was also the lingering, exciting implication that these bands had moved beyond heavy metal as we knew it. Anyone with a background in branding should have immediately identified the problem here. The name “post metal” says nothing about what the music sounds like unless you’re already familiar with two other genres. Worse, it makes you sound arrogant when you talk it up. Time has only made this impression worse. Heavy metal history walked right past post metal’s heyday. Now it is one style among many, and an old one at that. Had I known that one day Spotify would offer up a playlist with as headache inducing of a title as “All Things Post” I would have behaved differently on the internet in the 00s. I wouldn’t have tried to shove something beautiful into a box.
I didn’t think about any of this nonsense when I watched the video for “Leave Me Here” on my parents’ desktop. I did however think “these guys do kinda sound like Isis”. Knowing what I know now, having learned songs by both bands, I’d like to explain “Leave Me Here”’s greatness by comparing and contrasting Cult of Luna with their stateside contemporaries in Isis. Both bands will appear many more times in Drumming Upstream and I promise that after today I will never again in this series mention Isis when writing about Cult of Luna or vice versa.
Let’s start with what the two bands have in common. Both bands emerged from university cities with lively hardcore punk scenes. Both bands took the raw aggression of hardcore and stretched it out into something slower and meditative, de-emphasizing catchy riffs and focusing on rhythm and texture. Both deliberately took on names that invoked femininity to contrast with the macho world of heavy music. Their songs both swing wildly from soft to loud and obscure their vocals beyond walls of sound. These are similarities enough to warrant a subgenre, but the differences between the two bands tell a more evocative story.
For all of their mystery and obfuscation, Isis always sounded like the product of specific people. Their songs often start with everyone doing their own thing before gradually coming together for a climax. Everyone gets a chance to be themselves. Their mystery is the kind that used to sell cigarettes, a rugged individualism that doesn’t feel the need to explain itself. Cult of Luna on the other hand emphasize the group over the individual from the name down. Their extra huge lineup favors modularity: multiple indistinguishable singers, three guitarists, synth players that double as percussionists, two full drum sets on stage, all backlit to obscure their faces. Their songs don’t sound like the meeting point of individual preferences. Instead the band move as a single coordinated unit, or a giant whirring machine. No one instrument ever takes center stage. Guitars cede space to dense layers of percussion as often as they explode into room devouring roars. Isis’s Oceanic is a humid summer morning. Cult of Luna’s Salvation is a frigid winter afternoon with no visible sun. Isis were the open sea. Cult of Luna are a block of brutalist architecture. Isis were a basketball team. Cult of Luna are a football club.
This might all read like an American projecting his preconceptions about a foreign social democracy on a band he likes, but I actually think this collectivist thing is a deliberate choice on Cult of Luna’s part. For their first three records, the band’s primary lyrical focus was the alienating effect of globalized society on the individual. According to guitarist and vocalist Johannes Persson in a fan Q&A from 2008, Salvation was their first attempt to ground that subject in the psychology of a fictional character. In the video for “Leave Me Here” a man walks through a desolate urban area, pursued by men with wrenches for heads and met with surveillance cameras and CRT TVs at every turn. Cult of Luna’s other guttural bellower, Klas Rydberg, bellows gutturally from the TV screens in a state of despair. “False consciousness is beyond me” he roars in the closest thing to the song’s chorus. “Just leave me here”. Cult of Luna’s aren’t celebrating facelessness, but they aren’t naive about going it alone either. The protagonist of “Leave Me Here” stepped out of Plato’s Cave only to be paralyzed by reality. Rydberg and Persson are hardly explicit about the shape of the salvation that their hero seeks, but it is worth noting that by the end of the record they’ve stopped yelling “I” and instead yell “we”. Whatever the way out is, no one can find it alone.
This is the two fold genius of Cult of Luna’s collectivist version of heavy metal. In one song they can represent the soul crushing force of a capitalist system that grinds away autonomy while also proving by example how powerful individuals can be when they work together for a common goal. In the span of six minutes, they could alternate between skull-rattling heaviness and heart rending softness without losing their identity. An identity completely distinct from Isis, no matter how similar their riffs might sound.
There are other meaningful musical distinctions between Cult of Luna and Isis, but let’s save those for Side B where I’ll dig into Cult of Luna’s rhythmic language and their surprisingly conventional approach to song structure.
Side B
“Leave Me Here”
Performed by Thomas Hedlund
94-101 BPM
Only a few paragraphs ago I said that no single member of Cult of Luna takes the spotlight. That is only true if you don’t know what to listen for. For those with a more discerning ear, the band’s star player is obvious. That star is drummer Thomas Hedlund. I’ve been excited to talk about Hedlund for a while now. He’s one of my biggest influences on the drums, not just for his playing in Cult of Luna but for what he does when he’s not playing with them. When he isn’t in Cult of Luna, Thomas Hedlund plays drums for Phoenix. Yes, the French indie pop band Phoenix. “1901” Phoenix. Just look! There he is turning his kit to dust on David Letterman.
It tickles me pink that a ubiquitous indie hit has drums by the same guy that plays in a metal band that writes 10-minute long songs with Chomsky soundbites. Get you a drummer that can do both. I don’t just bring up Hedlund’s Phoenix moonlighting for trivia. If you watch his performance on “1901” you’ll get a quick summary of what makes him so good at drums in general, and in Cult of Luna in particular.
First, look how god damn hard he hits the drums. Not just at the loudest parts of the song but the whole time. In an interview with Modern Drummer in 2013 Hedlund admitted that he cared more about playing sports than music as a teenager. All that time cross training clearly paid off, this kind of endurance is athletic.2 It isn't just Hedlund's power that's impressive, his consistency is also mind blowing. The guy has a knack for playing his cymbals with the consistency of a programmed drum beat. Hedlund can replicate or imitate the sound of a machine but play with the live intensity of a human being. That is a rare combination, and it makes him the perfect drummer for Cult of Luna's industrial grade churn.
Power and consistency matter a lot when playing heavy music on drums, but Hedlund separates himself from the average metal drummer with his feel and dynamics. “Leave Me Here” gives him an opportunity to show off both. To explain why, let’s take a look at the song’s structure.
Despite its six minute runtime (that last minute is really just transitional material designed to set up the next track on the record) “Leave Me Here” is built out of a remarkably small amount of material. When you get down to it, the song has two modes, the heavy parts that are based on consistent syncopated rhythm and the soft parts that feel more like a marching band. Here’s what Cult of Luna built out of those ingredients. I’ve bolded the heavy parts:
Verse (0:00-0:46) 94 bpm
Chorus (0:46 - 1:32) 94 bpm
Bridge (1:32 - 3:26) 100 bpm
Verse (3:26 - 4:06) 95 bpm
Bridge (4:06 - 5:23) 101 bpm
Chorus (5:23 - 6:11) 96 bpm
All of the heavy sections, no matter the tempo, revolve around one central rhythm. The pattern goes long-long-short long-long-short.3 This pattern is the grid that every instrument in the band is either playing or playing off of. Played at a slow tempo the pattern lurches every time it turns back around. That lurch reaches deeper into your body than most metal songs care to. It doesn’t settle for your neck, it plunges into your chest and back. And when played right, it can go all the way to your hips. Here Hedlund excels where many a metal drummer has failed. The man understands groove. A quick survey of a playlist he curated for Cult of Luna’s Spotify account shows more hip-hop than anything else. For the chorus Hedlund moves his snare to the last beat of the pattern. This kind of drum beat is pretty common in West Indian or North African music. It isn’t so common in heavy music. With that kind of rhythmic verve at their backs Cult of Luna practically sound discoteque-ready.
If the heavy parts show Hedlund as Cult of Luna’s star, “Leave Me Here”’s soft parts highlight his teamwork skills. Hedlund is not the only percussionist credited on Salvation. Magnus Lindberg, the band’s in-house producer and guitarist, is also credited with percussion on the record. In some arrangements of the Cult of Luna live band, Lindberg takes over the drums during the first bridge. Obviously I love this for all of the day-dreaming lefty reasons I outlined earlier, but there’s also a nerdy logistical reason for the swap. In the bridge the drums switch from cymbals to toms. The color of the sound goes from bright to dark. To really bring out that rumbling, dark tonality Lingberg has his snare switched off. Practically speaking this makes it no different than a tom. It would be a feat of Spider-man-esque reflexes for Hedlund to switch his snare off in time to play this part correctly. Instead, given a chance to catch his breath he picks up a tambourine. In the second bridge the roles reverse. Hedlund takes the same rolling pattern Lindberg played in the first bridge and moves it to the snare, giving it a tight martial feel. Lindberg switches to his own tambourine. The pulse never wavers during either switch-over. The part takes priority over the player.
These bridges are what distinguish Cult of Luna from a mere Isis clone. It isn’t just that they break from the onslaught of the verse and chorus, any band with a pedal board can change their volume, Cult of Luna turn this break into a hook of its own. The layered tambourines, the electric piano, that Thom Yorke-ass vocal melody4 that sneaks in halfway through… Cult of Luna make sure their breathers are legit beautiful. When I first heard “Leave Me Here” the bridge shocked me. I didn’t know bands this heavy were allowed to be pretty this way. And of course this surprisingly delicate stretch only makes the return of the chorus all the more hair-raising. There’s more to say about Hedlund’s part in the final chorus but let’s save that for after the video of my take on the song.
A few notes on my performance. Since I am not two people I combined elements of both the percussion and the drum parts. This is why I’m stomping the heck out of the hi-hats. Instead of turning my snare off for the first bridge I moved the parts exclusively to the toms. I like the challenge of playing two people’s parts at once. I think it pushes me to be creative about how I use all four of my limbs.
Because I’ve listened to this song consistently since I was 15 this song wasn’t too tricky to learn. The exception is final chorus. Hedlund finally breaks free from the long-long-short grid, instead playing a high energy 3-against-4 polyrhythm. What I love about this fill is that it sounds just as mechanical as the main groove. It’s as if Hedlund is glitching out while the rest of the machinery carries on like nothing is wrong. I also love the way Hedlund stutters this polyrhythm at one point so that it lines back up with the rest of the band. That’s some clever Meshuggah-lite stuff.
Finally, let’s talk about the tempo. As you can see in the form chart above, Cult of Luna jump all over the place over the course of “Leave Me Here”. The soft bridges are noticeably faster than the heavier sections. I’d bet this is by design. It keeps these softer sections from dragging the energy of the song down, and it makes the heavier parts feel even weightier when they slow back down. What strikes me as weird is that the band jump up and down in tempo by the exact same integers every time. 6 bpm up for the soft parts, 5 bpm down for the heavy parts. This makes each heavy sections slightly faster each time. You hardly notice it for the second verse, but when the second chorus kicks in those two bpm make all the difference in the world. This is why the last chorus feels triumphant where the first felt oppressive. If this tempo shifting happened naturally then hats off to the band for their incredible precision. If these changes were programmed into the click track, then its by the far the most microscopic nit picking I’ve ever seen for a metronome. Gotta respect it either way.
But does this make the song better than Isis? Only one way to find out. Join me for the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard below.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
There was only one way this entry could end. I never for a second doubted that Cult of Luna would run laps around the lower rungs of the competition. The only real question is whether “Leave Me Here” stacks up to Aaron Turner and co’s “Carry”.
Is linearity better than pop structures? I go back and forth day by day. As a songwriter myself I lean toward the latter. Even the heaviest bands benefit from smart songwriting and economic use of their riffs. But then when I listen to “Carry” I’m blown away by how effective the song is despite having such an unconventional form.
But what really gives “Carry” the edge are Turner’s lyrics. This might be a little unfair since Cult of Luna aren’t writing in their native language, but the lyrics to “Leave Me Here” are pretty clumsy. Rydberg doesn’t exactly enunciate so you wouldn’t notice it when listening to the song, but reading along with the song is a good way to get let down. Let’s just say that I had to do a lot of my own heavy lifting to get my political read out of the song. “Carry” on the other hand is a genuinely unnerving piece of poetry no matter how you experience it. Isis wins this round.
“Leave Me Here” by Cult of Luna
Thank you for reading. The next entry of Drumming Upstream will feature the first returning artist of the series, albeit under a different name. See you then, have a nice week.
I’m talking about At The Gates, Entombed, and Meshuggah who are in turn responsible for the metalcore boom of the early 00s, the Entombedcore fad of the early 10s, and the complete and total Djentrification of heavy music. Meshuggah’s influence is so pervasive that including them here almost feels like a “Michael Jordan and I combined to score 70 points” situation.
To any drummers reading this, I know it sounds bro-y but I swear to god… start lifting weights. I’m not even moving anything that heavy but consistent exercise has made it SO much easier to play songs like this.
Long-long-short is practically the post-metal clave. For example, after touring with Cult of Luna the Orange County metalcore band Bleeding Through wrote an instrumental track based on a variation of the same rhythm called “The Truth”. You know what I thought when I first heard “The Truth”? “Kinda sounds like Isis”.
Thom Yorke will eventually appear in Drumming Upstream, as will his band Radiohead.