Cathedral
Endtyme

THE REVIEW

Year 2000. The new metal is cracked under the advertisements of MTV, and has resurrected in designer outfits. Extreme music lies bloated and emptied of destabilizing outcomes: murders, jail, a few too many lawsuits. Death metal is rediscovering its melancholy, and In Flames are riding the favorable wave; black metal has sunk into the depths of the underground, becoming in many ways a '77 punk part two (with the necessary proportions).

The Cathedral and their self-destructive leader Lee Dorrian, increasingly bloated and drenched in excesses, pause for a moment: they come down from the revivalist cloud of flowers and anomalous fumes, and realize that the Earth, abandoned a few albums earlier, is on the brink of collapse. This results in "Endtyme", a look back at the doom-filled past, an LP steeped in pessimism and oppressive visions. The music of the English band is no longer the soundtrack of a phantasmagorical parade in an old foggy village, with at most a few scares.

Songs made of mud and tar, sometimes unbearable in their lugubrious distortions, intense but lacking in liberating moments, epic outbursts of catharsis. Finally, a step back in the group’s evolution, a sigh of compositional fatigue that alternates notable moments (the beautiful "Requiem For The Sun", "Alchemist Of Sorrow") with less successful or unpleasant passages ("Whores To Oblivion" with its cacophonous finale). A few less oppressive moments pass almost unnoticed amidst so much sonic decay. Noteworthy is the initial assault, after the intro "Cathedral Flames", of "Melancholy Emperor", with its audacious and massive advance.

An honest work, primordial yet less avant-garde compared to other works by the group. For once, even the artwork deviates from the usual splendid, imaginative, and grotesque paintings, presenting a skeletal figure rising in its violet and golden tones, an unequivocal seal of a horribly dark, interesting but interlocutory work.