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\m/ Cathedral \m/


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  • 7 months later...

I'm listening to "The Guessing Game" from 2010. What is up with this album? it seems like a bit of a jazz odyssey to me. I like a little 60's type psychedelia, but the album seems not to be serious. Requiem for the Voiceless is heavy and different than what I've heard of Cathedral before and could have been a good anchor sound for an original sounding album (if you considering sounding a little like Candlemass grounds for originality, which I would). Does anyone love this album? If so please something nice about it.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...
I should snare a few more Cathedral records some time but everyone seems to say Forest Of Equilibrium and The Ethereal Mirror are their best albums so I dunno what else to look at from them.
I reckon you should try out The Carnival Bizarre, that's my favourite Cathedral album, second being Forest Of Equilibrium.
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  • 3 months later...

I figured that I ought to go to this, the band specific thread the better to go on about them. I love this band, but struggle with it a little. I dig the dudes vocals, and appriciate the way I can make out the words, at least 80% anyway, if I'm paying attention. It's an anal explosive style for sure and I can imagine some sort throbbing face with sharp teeth and forked tong singing it. It's a little revolting though. This band seems to really know what kind of music they want to make, since most of there albums seems very similar to me. I say this despite the loads of conversation on this thread about what are the favorite album of one or another of you. I've even singled out an album on this thread that I did not like, but still I say.... Well wait let me ask instead, Has this band changed in the years that they have been making music? They are wicked powerful musicians, and there songs all seem to move through crazy changes, kind of non stop. That is cool, but It's hard for me to keep pace with them while I'm listening along. Fuck, who are these people, and what is their deal? They kind of blow my mind.

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Yes Cathedral changed a great deal over the course of their existance. Forest Of Equilibrium is one of the most crushingly heavy doom/death albums I have ever heard but the sophmore album The Ethereal Mirror is straight up stoner doom which, whilst formidable, is a huge shift in sound. There are throwbacks to previous albums littered throughout Cathedral's discography but each album changes the formula a bit. Their swansong very nearly equals the power of their debut but in a different way again. I don't like everything they've done but for consistently re-inventing themselves I give Cathedral a rousing round of applause.

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  • 1 year later...

I used to love Cathedral back in mid 90s. I remember when 'The Carnival Bizarre' and 'Draconian Times' by Paradise Lost both came out in 1995 and my school had a theatre tour or something to the big bad city, so we went to a music store and there they were so I bought them both. 

Anyway, I really love 'The Ethereal Mirror', 'The Carnival Bizarre' and most of 'Supernatural Birth Machine', but for some reason I drifted off them after that. 'Forest of Equilibrium' is good but for me it's a bit unexciting, which I know is not a very popular thing to say. As for the albums that came out over the last 15 or so years, they really passed me by and I'm not sure why. 

I think it's time I went back and picked up two or three of those later era albums. I used to walk around in a Cathedral t-shirt for crying out loud, so I have no idea what happened to my interest levels...

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I only have their first two EARACHE CD's. I really like the track "SOUL SACRIFICE" off the first one. It's a complete Celtic Frost worship for a while, but then it also brings about that Judas Priest riff towards the track's finale! Lovely. I have a hard time sitting through the rest of the album, though.

I find it much easier to listen to their second.

But there is one thing I gotta tell you. Do you guys have Paul Chain's album "ALKAHEST" featuring Lee Dorrian singing on half of it?

Do you guys know who Paul Chain is? Here in Italy he is a legend and Lee Dorrian keeps him in very high regards. 

That "ALKAHEST" record is brilliant. Long story short, Dorrian was a fan of Paul Chain and so stayed in Italy for a few months at Paul's place to record this album back in 1994 or 1995. Paul Chain lives in Pesaro, which is not a big city, but it developed some sort of very important heavy metal scene over the years (thanks to Paul Chain's original band, DEATH SS). I have spoken to people who were there at the time and have very fond memories of getting stoned with Dorrian himself. They also told me that Paul Chain would rule Dorrian with an iron fist in the studio because he wanted to get everything his own way.

There are some scary legends about Paul Chain... and most of them are actually true! He only has one good eye because he lost sight in the other while performing a satanic rite in the 80's. He threw a dagger at something, but the dagger came back and hit him in the eye.

Back in the late 70's and early 80's Paul Chain and fellow Death SS founder Steve Sylvester were deeply involved in satanism, music and... drugs. They say that some members of Death SS would prostitute themselves to buy both drugs and, most of all, equipment. In those days you could not buy a Marshall in Italy, you had to import it. Some bands drove their way to the UK with vans just to buy their Marshall stacks. It may sound crazy, but it's true. Death SS used to perform satanic orgies in graveyards amidst bones and corpses. Their stage set featured actual human bones and skulls. Not one (like in Melissa's case), APLENTY. They stole anything from local tombs, including gravestones. I'd say early Death SS was the most radical fucked up band of its era (1977-1984) in the whole world. Unfortunately back then they could not be recorded properly here in Italy. Paul Chain ultimately denied Satan and converted to Christianity undergoing a mystic turnaround of big proportions. Under his new found faith he recorded some incredibly influential DOOM albums in the mid to late 80's... Dorrian, like many others connoisseurs, was a huge fan of the whole thing.

 

And here is track off the same album, but sung by Paul Chain himself. Paul Chain quit using English early on in his career and adopted a phonetic language that sounds like English but is probably made up of random sounds that only make sense to him (or to some exorcist, maybe).

 

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Paul Chain's music is fascinating, but I didn't know all that crazy stuff about him. I had heard the stuff with Dorian. Didn't he record with someone else famous like Matt Pike or Wino or someone like that? Some of his output seems like it ought to be edited a bit, but some is totally top notch. I take issue with the use of old art work, new recordings should get new art, that is my opinion.

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  • 7 months later...
So how do we collectively feel about Enter the Worms? It's the only Cathedral record I've ever experienced and I enjoyed what I heard. Not sure if that's am album you all like but I enjoyed it.
They have a song called Enter the Worms on their The Ethereal Mirror album, is that what you're talking about? If so, that trades places with Forest of Equilibrium as my favorite of theirs.

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Just now, BlutAusNerd said:

They have a song called Enter the Worms on their The Ethereal Mirror album, is that what you're talking about? If so, that trades places with Forest of Equilibrium as my favorite of theirs.

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That would be the one I'm sorry. I heard it on a playlist and I thought the song was the name of the album. 

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6 hours ago, BlutAusNerd said:

They have a song called Enter the Worms on their The Ethereal Mirror album, is that what you're talking about? If so, that trades places with Forest of Equilibrium as my favorite of theirs.

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'The Ethereal Mirror' is such a great album. 

A few months ago I went ahead about bought 'The Last Spire' so that I had their final album in the collection. It's pretty disappointing. Sort of like a more boring and less atmospheric Candlemass or something. Actually, it's just a more boring version of Cathedral. 

I love all of Lee Dorian's 'Ozzy-isms' on those old songs, "Oh yeah", "come on" and that sort of thing. So catchy and fun. 'The Carnival Bizarre' remains my favourite though. Songs like 'Vampire Sun', 'Hopkins' and 'Blue Light' will stay with me forever. I think I can sing that entire album through without a lyrics sheet, and those are some bizarre lyrics. 

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'The Ethereal Mirror' is such a great album. 
A few months ago I went ahead about bought 'The Last Spire' so that I had their final album in the collection. It's pretty disappointing. Sort of like a more boring and less atmospheric Candlemass or something. Actually, it's just a more boring version of Cathedral. 
I love all of Lee Dorian's 'Ozzy-isms' on those old songs, "Oh yeah", "come on" and that sort of thing. So catchy and fun. 'The Carnival Bizarre' remains my favourite though. Songs like 'Vampire Sun', 'Hopkins' and 'Blue Light' will stay with me forever. I think I can sing that entire album through without a lyrics sheet, and those are some bizarre lyrics. 
The Carnival Bizarre is good, but The Ethereal Mirror is pretty much the pinnacle of stoner/doom in my book. Weird, heavy, insanely catchy and fun. Forest of Equilibrium is sick though, basically the logical extreme of traditional doom metal with an unearthly vibe. Depending on my mood, I will reach for either as my preferred Cathedral album. I wouldn't call The Last Spire a disappointment since I didn't expect much from it. It was back to the heaviness of old, and even though the songwriting wasn't anywhere near as good as their old stuff, it was still a decent enough swansong for the band.

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4 hours ago, BlutAusNerd said:

The Carnival Bizarre is good, but The Ethereal Mirror is pretty much the pinnacle of stoner/doom in my book. Weird, heavy, insanely catchy and fun. Forest of Equilibrium is sick though, basically the logical extreme of traditional doom metal with an unearthly vibe. Depending on my mood, I will reach for either as my preferred Cathedral album. I wouldn't call The Last Spire a disappointment since I didn't expect much from it. It was back to the heaviness of old, and even though the songwriting wasn't anywhere near as good as their old stuff, it was still a decent enough swansong for the band.

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You like the older stuff better? How surprising ;)

As far as 'The Last Spire' goes, I think Cathedral are a great example - like My Dying Bride - of a band that sounds fresh and hungry on their early material, yet a little uninspired and paint-by-numbers twenty years later.

I guess that's inevitable playing a certain style of music where riffs are fundamentally the same, just tweaked, for years and years on end. The end result is albums like 'The Last Spire' and 'Feel the Misery'. Perfectly acceptable but hardly life-changing, and ultimately a sad reflection of former glories. 

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You like the older stuff better? How surprising [emoji6]

As far as 'The Last Spire' goes, I think Cathedral are a great example - like My Dying Bride - of a band that sounds fresh and hungry on their early material, yet a little uninspired and paint-by-numbers twenty years later.

I guess that's inevitable playing a certain style of music where riffs are fundamentally the same, just tweaked, for years and years on end. The end result is albums like 'The Last Spire' and 'Feel the Misery'. Perfectly acceptable but hardly life-changing, and ultimately a sad reflection of former glories. 

That seems like a fair assessment on all counts, I guess I just don't mind a retread of former territory when it's done fairly well.

 

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Upon listening to a good amount of Cathedral the past couple days I think Ethereal Mirror is my favorite. Although I think the song Ride doesn't fit with the rest of the record. Not a bad song, just seems out of place stylistically speaking.
It's a foreshadowing of what was to come, but it's not alone on the record with tracks like Midnight Mountain cranking up the fun factor.

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27 minutes ago, BlutAusNerd said:

It's a foreshadowing of what was to come, but it's not alone on the record with tracks like Midnight Mountain cranking up the fun factor.

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Yeah like I said, not bad. Just kind of.. threw me off a little. But overall this band is fucking killer. I dig them a lot. Also, aforementioned cold has turned ugly. I'm starting to think it may be the flu in disguise.

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  • 1 year later...

I always have been somewhat at odds with Cathedral. I understand the importance and their roll within the doom metal genre but i think their albums are hit and miss. First three or so are outright classics but after that i tend to get quite picky. I wasn´t such a big fan of the proggy/psychedelic influences that crept in on later releases. I guess "Endtyme" was the last release that i truly enjoyed from beginning to end. Still i gotta hand it to Lee Dorian for keeping doom metal alive and supporting many other doom bands through his label Ris Above which put out many excellent releases.

I think Cathedral did well quitting while they were ahead. They probably did everything possible within the genre up to that point. And continuing would have meant they would have started rehashing their own sound. And to be honest at the end of the day i prefer his new band With The Dead over most Cathedral releases. The With the Dead releases sound so much heavier and primitive, exactly how i like my doom metal.

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