Cathedral "The Garden of Unearthly Delights" (Nuclear Blast)
By Ari Joffe
Friday. Feb 10, 12:51 AM
Long-running doomsters push themselves to the outer limits.

Cathedral have never been afraid of experimentation, regardless of what fans or record labels have had to say. Over the course of the band’s 16 years, their sound has freely flowed between dirge-doom, classic British metal, and retro ‘70s muscle car hard rock. The Garden of Unearthly Delights is a high water mark for the band that combines all those styles with a sense of musical freedom and sonic experimentation one would associate with the Bob Ezrin produced Alice Cooper records from the early ‘70s, as well as the best of Pink Floyd’s work.

It’s an approach to writing rock songs that allows the musicians to arrange their tunes in a big, broad way. Moments where they could have easily let the standard guitar/bass/drums instrumentation just roll on through are instead replaced with a chorus of chirping voices, spacey acoustic funk grooves, flutes, or a singular female voice. The songs become way larger, grander even, than the more familiar verse-chorus-verse song structure allows for. This doesn’t mean the songs sound “slick” in any way. They’re as raw as ever, yet meticulously arranged without any regard to what’s “expected.” It’s a freaky way to go about things, and the fellas really let their hippy colors show on the album’s centerpiece, the 27 -minute opus “The Garden.”

Trippy is an accurate word for this album, in that it takes you on a trip. There seems to be some larger lyrical theme at work here, that, honestly, I have yet to decipher. I’m 99% sure it’s hiding somewhere in vocalists Lee Dorrian’s tales of witchcraft, war, pagan persecution, and apocalyptic pronouncements.

This is an awesome, eclectic, mature record, and it’s clear that the band enjoy pushing their playing, writing, and arranging skills as far as they’ll go. I’d recommend this highly to fans of the band’s early ‘90s classic, The Ethereal Mirror. Those not yet initiated into Cathedral’s coven may want to start with the excellent best-of and rarities compilation, The Serpent’s Gold, released by Earache in 2004.
www.cathedralcoven.com
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Ari Joffe

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