Various Artists
Dark Passages

Summing up my two debaseriote accounts, this is the two hundred and fiftieth review I write on the site. We must somehow celebrate the event with one of those crushing pages, as the good Genital Grinder has accustomed you to.

We start with obligation and devotion by mentioning the mind behind this audibly annoying collection. Lee Dorrian was born in Coventry (UK) in June 1968 and for about three years was the dramatic, torn, lacerating voice of Napalm Death. His were the inhuman screams in the second part of Scum and in From Enslavement to Obliteration: he is the inventor of the growl. In 1989, at the end of the recordings of the Mentally Murdered EP, he left the band due to some irreparable disagreements on the continuation of the so far destructive career.

He put together Cathedral and headed in a completely different direction: no longer the frantic speed in short and splintered auditory assaults sung and played in a feral manner. Lee has only one watchword: slow down the sound as much as possible, starting from the Doom of Black Sabbath. Heavy, burdensome, exasperating slowness: a sort of Black Sabbath at "sixteen RPM." (At this point, it is recommended to listen to the very first album of Cathedral, that "Forest of Equilibrium" true, deadly, icy milestone of a genre. A work, in my humble opinion, still unattainable for anyone who has engaged with these sounds).

But Lee isn't satisfied with his new creature; so he creates his own record label which couldn't be more underground: "Rise Above Records." The first works produced by him, with filthy and almost unlistenable sounds, are heart-wrenching live recordings of Napalm Death and the Japanese S.O.B.

He permanently abandons Grindcore and does so by calling to his horrific court a whole series of bands that have just started their musical career. Bands composed of very young people who want to revive the heaviness of Doom; a word that means "adverse fate, destiny" and is meant to indicate everything that is arcane, ancient, magical, and mysterious.

This is the genesis of the compilation Dark Passages, dated 1991.

Initially released on vinyl and only later published also in CD format with a couple more tracks.

Listening is extremely difficult because all the bands engaged here produce an exasperatingly slow, stagnant, gloomy, glacial sound.

Cathedral, and it could not be otherwise, open the death dances with "Mourning Of A New Day": eight minutes of crushing slowness. All the instruments seem to operate in slow motion; Lee's voice comes from the cold abyss and is an evil rasp of a person who has one and a half feet in the grave. They play so slowly that at first listen you are convinced you have to move the RPM selector from 33 to 45 (I recall doing it myself because the track sounded too weak and apathetic to my ears).

As I have already said, the whole album resonates in the same way: there is no point in adding more...EBONY TEARS...

Diabolos Rising 666.