Album of the album: Cathedral – The Garden of Unearthly Delights

The recent Cathedral albums while replete with voluminous riffs lacked the quirky, anachronistic otherworldliness which makes them so endearing, especially Lee Dorian’s livid Moorcock / Colin Wilson prose extolling the pleasures of myopic zombies, malevolent magi, and all other manner of devilish, altered states chicanery coupled with Garry Jennings’s cavernous boogie drones seemed to be replaced with a more prosaic version of themselves. It’s their innate ability to inject a welcome thrum of boogie into the Poe-faced genre of doom which makes Cathedral so enticing a prospect.

The Garden of Unearthly Delights is unequivocally their masterwork, a glorious summation of a career dedicated to the manifold pleasures of elephantine funereal doom and mesmerizing bell bottomed boogie. Nothing on this album is contrived or by rote… this is a full-bloodied, magnificently celebratory ode to 70′s rock obscurio, heaving with anachronistic bombast and gleeful, folky eccentricity…

It’s Cathedral’s (un)canny and witty evocation of this most fecund of era’s which lends The Garden of Unearthly Delights such gravitas, and many recognizable motifs from these halcyon days are given a muscular pyrotechnic work out -unabashed lyrical phantasmagoria, bloated, bootilicious riffs, festooned with monstroid Randy Holden overkill, and florid, protracted jams the length of which would terrify the likes of Klaus Schulze…

The titular track is Cathedral’s wildest conceit, 27 minutes of grandiloquent doom where inspirational, circuitous doom mantras morph into ethereal folky esoterica, then billow out in artful shrouds of giddy kraut rock atmospherics, and playfully confound with brazen Spinal Tap tomfoolery  (18 minutes in I was waiting for the pint-sized Stonehenge to wobble onto centre stage!) all of which could make for an excruciating experience if it wasn’t anchored by the dynamic and sure-footed pairing of Smee and Jennings –these mercurial riff finder generals yield some truly jaw-dropping bassadelic fury, so sublime is their interaction that one would have to be buried in concrete not to be moved by it.

This gorgeous album yields its juiciest thrill with track four, the jaunty, Uriah Heep pop-crunge of ‘Corpsecycle’ making it Cathedral’s very own ‘Paranoid’ and hands down the best rock song you’ll hear this year. As rock / metal is inexorably strangled by irony and vapid posturing it’s genuinely enthralling to witness a band still playing with all the arrogant swagger of youth.
Jason

Cathedral – The Garden of Unearthly Delights
CD / LP – Nuclear Blast: 2005

(Please click here for the audio stream of Cathedral live at Roadburn 2009)

Tags: album of the day, cathedral, doom, doom metal, garry jennings, lee dorrian, nuclear blast

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 11:44 am and is filed under 2009, News, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.