Sunday 31 March 2013

She Sells Sanctuary (The Cult)

If you enjoy this song, please be respectful of its creators by buying it.

I am a big fan of The Cult. In addition to owning several of their albums -- which I legitimately purchased, and it is one of my little materialistic joys that I continue to buy CDs -- I saw Ian Astbury performing live with Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek once. It was a spectacular show, and one of the more memorable events of my life.

The band’s history is a tumultuous one, with a higher-than average turnover of personnel, troubling legal woes, and one Japanese tour that had to be cancelled because they wrecked all their equipment en route. However you would never guess this just on the basis of their music, which paints them as the epitome of an unassuming, distinctive, talented and straight-up hard rock band. I have never had any question of their artistic integrity, and in my opinion they are melodically and lyrically imaginative musicians.

‘She Sells Sanctuary’ has beautifully mystical undertones woven through its driving, energetic pulse; although it doesn’t feature the most poetic vocals that Astbury has come up with, it still gets its message across. And as with pretty much everything else in my internal firmament, it revolves around the most significant phenomenon of my life: the person who I think of as my sanctuary, the one individual who truly helped me find inner peace and who never fails to restore my calm when “the world drags me down”.

It’s a song I find hypnotic and arresting, but at the same time it fills my soul with ethereal veins of fire and opens my horizons to all kinds of magical possibilities.

Check it out on YouTube