Cathedral
In Memorium

After shouting his cynical invectives against everything and everyone in the first albums of Napalm Death, Lee Dorrian decides to leave the godfathers of Grindcore in the second half of 1989; he is not at all favorable to the impending Death Metal turn that will materialize with the release of “Harmony Corruption”. He immediately starts anew with a sluggish new creation, Cathedral, radically changing genre and vocal interpretation.

This EP of only four tracks represents the debut of the group, published at the end of 1990 as a demo and initially released only on cassette tape. It was later reissued on purple-colored vinyl in 1994 by “Rise Above Records”, a record label founded by Lee himself.

A cover that explicitly wants to introduce us to Cathedral's music: two skeletons joined in a deadly embrace to a black coffin, with blood still profusely flowing from wounds caused by barbed wire binding the wrists of the two former living beings. With the band’s logo above them, also purple, which hints of the arcane, of the ancient.

Like Black Sabbath at sixteen revolutions, devouring the suffocating and heavy Doom of Pentagram and Saint Vitus: this is how the eight minutes of “Mourning of a New Day” begin, a track of chilling beauty where the two guitars weave slow, heavy, mammoth tapestries never heard before. “A new day, in static movement I drift. The atmosphere sinks into the grey of my soul. Mourning is likewise the drowning of a new day.” Thus Lee declaims his personal sermon, with an equally heavy voice that comes from the most inaccessible infernal horrors; a voice bearing the scent of imminent death. A song that still provokes, after many years since the first listens, insane terror.

The pace becomes just slightly less sluggish with the second song; a tribute to Pentagram and their “All Your Sins”; but don't be fooled by appearances, because we are still in the presence of a spectral and dark sound that retraces in a sacred way the slowness of the original written by Bobby Liebling (may he always be praised on par with Cathedral).

Just under thirty minutes is the duration of the record, which concludes with over seven of “March” written by guitarist Garry Jennings alone, another historical member who together with Lee will lay the solid foundations of the entire career of the Cathedral. An instrumental track, a long horrible, crepuscular, foggy march; the worthy conclusion of a fundamental first work of all the Doom Metal that will follow.

The musical history of the Coventry band will continue until 2013, with a long series of always successful albums; but none, not even the debut on long-distance “Forest of Equilibrium”, will reach this burdensome and morbid slowness.

Ad Maiora.