Originating at the solo recording moniker of Southampton’s Chapman Lee, Cult Film has since evolved into a full band through the addition of Ali Chester and Isaac Macpherson. Inspired by bedroom pop heavyweights like Alex G and Car Seat Headrest, Lee’s writing was very much grounded in the lo-fi aesthetic, and despite the extra instrumentation, the band maintain the intimate, DIY spirit on their debut EP, Mona.
We’re thrilled to be able to share the record, which is also the debut release of Bournemouth-based cassette label Devil Town Tapes, a few days before it comes out later this week. Opener ‘Bored To Death’ introduces Lee’s distinctive vocal delivery, drawing from the disaffected drawl of Will Toledo to produce a sound that’s at once emotive and ironic. There’s a confrontational tone too, a generalised anger that’s long since been unhooked from any one cause and left to wash of the ways of life itself.
This world is chemicals
and violence,
I don’t want to sound like
apathetic, but it all feels so indifferent
I wasn’t born in the 80’s
I wish I wasn’t born at all
There’s man crying in the bathroom,
I say,
Shut the fuck up!
‘Fantasies’ follows a similar vibe, personal worries combining with those of the wider world, or else hiding behind them so as to excuse their existence. The falseness of the situation lends an air of isolation, loneliness cutting through the charade. With a significant difference in sound, leaning more toward the tenderness of Hovvdy, the title track plays like an acknowledgement of this, the hip detachment dropped in favour of an earnest attempt at communication. And closer ‘Your Thing’ continues the change, a climbing down from the position of apathy, an opening up to something more risky and meaningful.
Because, for all of its bummed out detachment and disillusioned swagger, Mona is a sincere record. The irony is born of self-consciousness rather than silliness—it’s not that Cult Film don’t believe in what they want to say, rather realise how they will sound in saying it. This is cynicism as self-preservation, an attempt to survive the vulnerability and futility of feeling in a world such as our own. But, slowly across the EP, Cult Film appear to suggest that things do not have to be this way. That perhaps futility can be confronted through the act of being vulnerable, of letting things in.
Photo by Bella Alexandrova