For nearly a decade, indie-pop band Cults has dealt in the mystique of contradiction. Brian Oblivion’s lush, bewitching instrumentation and Madeline Follin’s guileless vocals, sung in the style of a Phil Spector girl group, conjure the wish-fulfilling fantasy of teenage daydreams. The twist is that Follin’s lyrics tend to recount the ruins of humanity, from alienation and hopelessness to temptation and amorality. With their fourth album, Host, the duo deploys the same tonal contradiction between music and messaging, this time chronicling the euphoric highs and harrowing lows of a parasitic relationship.
With the detail-oriented obsession of hardboiled detectives, Oblivion and Follin study a romance’s toxic dynamic from multiple angles across the album’s 12 tracks. Buoyed by histrionic, ’60s pop-style violin stabs, “Trials” sees Follin fretting that her lover is so invasive and consuming that he watches her even in her dreams. But she doesn’t play the damsel in distress, à la the Shangri-Las, for too long. She unflinchingly wrestles with the dark and twisted particulars of desire, as on the sweeping “Spit You Out,” where she purges herself from her toxic partner: “Leech, held on, I spit you out/Cleaned you from my tongue.”
Host is the first Cults album to be recorded primarily with live instruments, but the band’s sound continues to be synth-driven. Showy horns give “8th Avenue” a bluesy hue, while “Monolithic” is bolstered by an imaginative, layered string arrangement. Oblivion’s electronic kinetics, however, are responsible for heightening the songs’ drama and suspense: “Working It Over” and “A Purgatory” both boast hooks that turn anthemic thanks to the application of dense, otherworldly synths. Producer Shane Stoneback resumes his role as the unofficial third member of the group, ensuring that Host, in spite of its dabbling in live instrumentation, springs from the same atmospheric vein as previous Cults albums.
The group toys with unexpected melody formulation throughout the album—a gamble that doesn’t always pay off. On “Honest Love,” Fullin whispers a bewildering, oscillating refrain that grates against the robotic backing vocal. The scattered melody on “No Risk” is similarly puzzling and makes the song’s brief two-and-a-half minutes feel like an eternity. Although the band earns points for risk-taking, their flirtation with dissonance is less inventive than it is jarring, producing songs that amount to Frankenstein-like composites.
The album’s real allure is rooted in Cults’s representation of Stockholm syndrome, that sickeningly insidious pathology responsible for a host’s attachment to its parasite. The intoxicating “Shoulders to Feet” depicts attachment to a toxic partner as an almost spiritual devotion. During the soaring refrain, Fullin sings, full of conviction: “Shoulders to my feet/You’re everything I need.” Just as cult leaders are said to exploit faith, so do parasites with their victims, instilling in them the belief that all is for the greater good. Whereas faith represents salvation for most, Host suggests that it can just as easily be one’s undoing.
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