Track Listing

1. Born into This
2. Citizens
3. Diamonds
4. Dirty Little Rockstar
5. Holy Mountain
6. I Assassin
7. Illuminated
8. Tiger in the Sun
9. Savages
10. Sound of Destruction

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #174857 in Music
• Released on: 2007-10-02
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .19 pounds

Album Description
Legendary Alternative Rock band The Cult return with all guns blazing on their eighth studio album 'Born Into This', their first in six years. Reminiscent of earlier works 'Love' and 'Electric', the album sees the band returning to their rock roots while embracing several modern sonic elements in many of the songs. With 'Born Into This', The Cult have created an album that not only speaks to their rabid fanbase, but seeks to put them squarely back on the map as one of the greatest straight-up rock & roll bands in the World. Quintessential Cult songs like 'Dirty Little Rockstar' and 'I Assasin' and their enormous hooks will allow them to do just that. Produced by Youth (Killing Joke, The Verve) and mixed by Clive Goddard (Primal Scream, Madonna), the album is instantly recognizable Cult from Billy Duffy's first guitar chord to the first notes that escapes Ian Astbury's lips. A classic album from The Cult that features everything the band is known-for: groove-laden guitar riffs, searing leads, giant choruses, soaring vocals and a whole load of attitude. Over twenty years into their career and over 10 million albums sold, 'Born Into This', shows one of rock's first true Alternative bands delivering a seminal album at the top of their game.

Amazon.com
The Cult promised a re-imagining of heavy metal in 1985 when they fringed raging guitar riffs with psychedelic tassels and shoegazer moodiness on Love. But by the time of their next album, Electric, they had shed their paisleys in favor of biker leather, and swapped surging, impassioned anthems in favor of plodding metal riffs. On their latest album, Born Into This, the Cult slathers on the rock-rebellion attitude like a teenager slathering on Brut. Ian Astbury remains one of the great power singers, but now that he's in his mid-forties, I'm not sure I'm buying him singing about "Dirty Little Rockstars." It's one of the many fist-waving tirades on Born Into This that also includes an anti-war screed, "Tiger in the Sun." They take a stab at a rock ballad with the Elvis Presley-meets-Johnny Cash brooding of "Holy Mountain," but it comes off as a genre exercise. Despite having Youth at the production desk, and deploying some ferocious guitar by Billy Duffy across big, piston shredding beats, the Cult ultimately sound like a good metal band, when they initially prophesied so much more. --John Diliberto

Customer Reviews

Enough solid songs to recommend
I expected to be very disappointed by this album. Another literary reference for a title, from a Bukowski poem and Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil" for the last album. (Ian, we get it , you read). Then, the first time I heard "Dirty Little Rockstar" it sounded like The Cult covering INXS covering the Stones, "Undercover of the Night".

Nonetheless, I"m converted.

"I Assassin" and "Illuminated" instantly caught my attention and all but 2 of the other songs are rapidly growing on me. Granted, there are no riffs or solos that are gonna make any guitar players envious, but the album still stands on its own merits. I think the comparisons to "Love" and "Electric" are overblown. "Born Into This" sounds more like their under-rated, self-titled album with a few throwbacks to "Love". That's good enough for me.

Now if Ian would just lose the bandana and work the crowd when they tour.

Cult-like
At times on the new Cult album, they sound like a band that's trying to imitate the Cult rather than the real article themselves. Sure, they can still kick it from time to time, and the guitars blare and drums pound throughout Born Into This, but the CD mostly seems to be missing that indefinable something. Whatever it was that made albums like Love and Electric so powerful, it's mostly absent from Born Into This. As for singer and band leader Ian Astbury, he's in fine form on the occasional winner like "I Assassin," but more often he sounds like he's holding back. I wondered if his time spent playing Jim Morrison took more out of him than we know. The songs mostly just blur together -- I have the feeling that if I heard these songs in concert, their sameness would put me in some kind of daze that only a Cult classic like "Fire Woman" would snap me out of. The one song that's a little different, "Holy Mountain," has Ian crooning in true Elvic fashion against a piano & acoustic guitar backdrop. It's more amusing than entertaining, and also highlights another unpleasant aspect of Astbury's current vocal style, which is excessive tremolo. At times the quavering notes distract the listener and obscure the melody. Another thing that annoyed me about the CD was the sometimes harsh sound, especially on the 2nd track. I played the CD on two different set-ups and the bad moments sounded equally bad both places.

A Harsh and Underdeveloped Low-Point.
Congratulations Billy and Ian - you have just released your worst album.

No, let me start over.
I am a huge fan of The Cult. I own everything they have released and not one of their studio albums is a dud...until now. This is a forgettable, harshly and roughly produced album of underwritten and sadly forgettable songs. There's not a memorable hook, lyric, or riff here and Ian's voice has developed an undefinable "something" which grates right alongside the grating bad production.

Like many others I have been waiting years for this thing, positive that it would be another classic Cult record, but as so many aging bands reach "that" age, they start to lose the plot, or just give up on trying very hard. There's no spark, no fire, no drive on display here. Don't even get me started on that cover-art or the song "Dirty Little Rock Star" which both scream Middle Age Out-of-Touch.

I will continue to look forward to Cult releases and try to block this one out of my head, it pretty much sucks.