Southern Death Cult

The sole full-length of Southern Death Cult wasn’t really an album, instead consisting of their sole single, radio session cuts and live recordings, and given that the sole point of continuity from there to Ian Astbury’s later work was Astbury himself, it’s easy to frame the band as a starting point more than anything else. But better instead to consider it as a document of a place and time, where postpunk impulses combined with an admittedly imperfect interpretation of American First Nation cultures resulted in drum-heavy, dramatically sung performances.