In February 2011, Cathedral announced that they will disband after one more album, entitled “The Last Spire”, which will be released in April 2013. Even further, they even played their official final show on December 3rd 2011.
Back then vocalist Lee Dorrian explained, “It’s simply time for us to bow out. Twenty one years is a very long time and it’s almost a miracle that we managed to come this far!.”
Honestly, I never was a huge doom metal supporter, nor Napalm Death fan back in their furious grindcore days. When Lee Dorrian left Napalm death in 1989 to form Cathedral with Mark ‘Griff’ Griffiths (a Carcass roadie) and Garry ‘Gaz’ Jennings (formerly of thrash metal upstarts Acid Reign), I wasn’t really interested. But I have to admit it, their 1991 debut album, “Forest of Equilibrium”, it’s one of its kind, something disturbing, extremely dark and uniquely heavy. Now, nine albums later, I hope that Lee Dorrian will have second thoughts and “The Last Spire” will be only a station, and not the final destination in the journey of Cathedral.
This is another album of atmosphere, of dark, heavy emotions, of honest and mainly sustained disappointment. It’s definitively something wrong with this world, with this species, with this society and eventually with every single one of us. But listening to the beautiful and epic “An Observation” I almost forgot about that too. It’s something magic, captivating, something very powerful and addictive about Cathedral. It’s probably one of the best metal releases of the year, but also, probably one of the most under-rated and less promoted ones as well.
It doesn’t really need labels, tags, this is simply the most genuine and solid metal you could possibly find these days. But if you really need a tag, well, Cathedral and their music it’s… endangered. Unfortunately. This is definitively a too early retirement.
Drummer Brian Dixon will continue to perform with The Crunched, no information about the future planes of Lee Dorrian.
Tracklist:
01 – Entrance to Hell
02 – Pallbearer
03 – Cathedral of the Damned
04 – Tower of Silence
05 – Infestation of Grey Death
06 – An Observation
07 – The Last Laugh
08 – This Body, Thy Tomb
