Probably not as high on the Controversy Index as our blurbs would indicate…
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[5.82]
Pete Baran: It’s the Raveonettes without reverb.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: God, this is what the Internet is pissed about and/or pissed at people being pissed about? This is about as simple as songs get: it’s like cartoon tropism. The girl starts singing about love and heartbreak amid handclaps and shimmery bits — the flower flings itself open. The dude starts mumbling, and the handclaps go away — the flower claps shut. But this is a happy heartbreak and happy cartoon, so exit Guy, re-enter the rest. It’s a cheap cartoon, more like a doodle, but what about it could possibly upset you?
[6]
Hazel Robinson: No, Cults; if she’s been abducted and is left on a road to bleed out that is not a great metaphor for breaking her heart. Not only is the concept so blindingly stupid it leaps straight to the hard-to-miss offense but all they had to do was say that her heart had been abducted to avoid that. For fuck’s sake. Mind you, it’d still be some shit jangly indie.
[2]
Iain Mew: Madeline Follin’s keening pain and outrage cuts right through this so powerfully that there’s little chance of anything else keeping up with her. I guess the attempts at studied cool in between act as relief from the intensity, but I think I’d prefer if it was just full on searing emotion for three minutes.
[6]
Matthew Harris: The most frustrating thing about Cults – and probably why they cause some Internet consternation – is that they get applauded for their “tweenage” sound. But if they grew up, threw out the xylophone, added more guitar feedback and smoked up the vocals to “Abducted,” they’d have a pretty good song. Of course, at that point, it would be a Dum Dum Girls’ song, so I guess I see their dilemma.
[5]
Ian Mathers: Hey, even overrated indie buzz bands can usually muster up a decent tune or two. The problem with adopting girl-group aesthetics (even if you muss them up with post-JAMC/”shitwave” LOL/low-fi fuzz) is that most modern examples seem to forget the division of labour that tended to take place. Far be it from me to tell you that there are some people who are good at writing songs and others who are good at performing them, but something like “Abducted” just tends to seem sloppy in comparison (again, even without considering the production). That Cults try and take things a little bit darker isn’t helping to take my mind off of, say, the Ronettes – it just means that I’m reaching for “I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine” instead of “Be My Baby.”
[6]
Michaela Drapes: Go ahead, feel free to cut through the hype, the questions about the backstory, the backlash — because eventually you’ll get down to the good stuff: the tinny yet dense faux wall of sound production, dueling girl/boy vocals, the bleak broken-heart-as-police-procedural imagery in the lyrics. Yes, you could point down a long line of indie pop bands through the years (and more recently, too) that strolled down this same primrose path, but Cults have an elusive je ne sais quoi (seriously, I can’t tell you what it is — the drums, Madeline Follin’s pitch-perfect vocals?) that somehow keeps them from sounding (amazingly!) like a flimsy facsimile of the best of Sarah Records and Cherry Red back catalogs.
[8]
Zach Lyon: For one thing, there’s absolutely nothing about this band that should be “controversial.” I’m tired of seeing that word associated with them. (Oh, I’m not helping.) They made an album of simple, not-incredibly-ambitious-but-distinct-in-voice songs that occasionally sound nice, but rarely stick out (though “You Know What I Mean” is a killer). At best, they sound like they’re playing in the most youthful and vibrant black-and-white movie of the past five years. “Abducted” is somewhere near there. Her voice strains to carry the song perhaps as much as it should, and the lyric is a bit too irreverent to pay close attention to, so the weight of the track falls on the sound. That isn’t a bad thing.
[7]
Sally O’Rourke: Girl group is almost certainly my most-beloved genre of pop music, but I’ve been less than dazzled by Indiedom’s current fad for restaging The Shangri-Las in a diazepam haze. The girlish vocals are embraced as a crutch by singers of indifferent talent, while the songs themselves are underwritten and the production is superficial at best. (Go ahead and transpose the “Be My Baby” beat from drums to bass: it’s still a lazy signifier.) “Abducted” almost gets there in the chorus, and Lady Cult’s Mary Weiss impression is better than most, but where’s the grandeur? The melodrama? The verses?
[6]
Jer Fairall: Madeline Follin’s got a gale force of a voice to match Neko Case and Bethany Consentino, though I’m not yet convinced that her band has properly transcended the genre limitations that, much like with Best Coast and very much unlike Neko, leave this sounding a bit too affected in its retro-ness. But if she’s gonna go that route, this is the way to do it, sweeping with Spectorian melodrama on that killer of a chorus, with a thin lo-fi guitar and shoegazey boy given a brief vocal bit just to make it abundantly clear that we’re not in Winehouse/Duffy territory here.
[7]
Jonathan Bradley: It’s so dispiriting to hear ideas you loved on first encounter deployed as mere tricks, particularly when they still work effectively. “Abducted” begins with a wispy sing-song vocal by Madeline Follin, which gives her a sense of naïveté reminiscent of a storybook character on the cusp of a great adventure. It builds into a breathless, excited shriek that befits a tale of being “torn apart,” one that’s accompanied by a driving bassline of the sort I loved from Interpol and the otherworldly swirl that made the first Arcade Fire album so engaging. But it’s because I have seen these tricks before that I can’t lose myself in the song. It’s like reading a kids’ novel as an adult, and recognizing how much you would have loved it if you were younger. Would I have marvelled at The Phantom Tollbooth if I’d only first read it yesterday? Would I have fallen head over heels for Cults if I’d they’d existed in 2003?
[7]