Endtyme

A new millennium was reason enough for Cathedral to reassess their reason for existing and realise there was still a lot of that Ye Olde English Sabbath Doom Metal in their old rocking bones after the last few years of wandering in the retro-Seventies wilderness. "Endtyme" is a welcome return to form and even if that album doesn't quite scale the heights of "Forest of Equilibrium", it has enough to satisfy the original fan set and newer fans who might prefer the more groovy and fun-loving Cathedral incarnation.

"Cathedral Flames" is a suitably forbidding and majestic instrumental intro to the album before the band charges through fairly straightforward melodic stoner rock stuff in tracks like "Melancholy Emperor", "Requiem Sun" (very nice psychedelic-sounding, almost bleached guitar solo at the beginning) and "Whores to Oblivion" (good scratchy guitar effects at the end of the song). The lyrics are a curious mix of the apocalyptic / post-apocalyptic, science fiction, sword-and-sorcery fantasy and historical fairy-tales that are grimmer than the tales of the Brothers Grimm: in other words, nothing out of the ordinary for the fans. The song-writing has improved - it's still highly visual and colourful but with much less of the purple prose that sometimes blighted albums like "Carnival Bizarre".

The better songs are concentrated in the second half of the album: the music is more varied and there is some experimentation on tracks like "Ultra Earth" which approaches blues in its sound and singing in parts. "Alchemist of Sorrows" inserts dreamy passages of acoustic guitar and despondent clean-voiced singing into an otherwise powerful and heavy bludgeoning doom metal juggernaut of steely riffs and emphatic percussion. There's even room for a runaway train of zinging guitar melody and frenzied rhythms in the second half of the song. "Astral Queen" is a trippy piece with tribal drumming, some field recordings and a wonderful vibrating drone sequence of a UFO landing on planet Earth. "Sea Serpent" is a return to familiar melodic stoner rock / doom metal and shouty vocals before the final track "Templars Arise! (The Return)", an intriguing slow doom metal piece harking back to the band's first album with some added ambient effects and even an organ on the slower prog-rock parts. The band members mess about with form, structure and sound texture in a soupy yet huge atmospheric black space which makes for a very memorable conclusion to the album.

For an hour-long album, there isn't much filler at all and the album improves as it progresses with its second half more interesting, less obviously commercial and freer than the first half. Even the weak tracks are quite strong in melody, riffing and enthusiastic delivery and would have done well as a separate mini-album. The album's execution is tight and the sound can be very massive and over-powering which, in Cathedral's case, is always welcome and should be overlooked! Dorrian may never be a great singer but he's not afraid to tackle whatever his bandmates throw at him in spite of his limited vocal range; his eccentric style is a distinctive part of the band's approach and Cathedral would be just another sludgey doom / stoner rock band if they didn't have him.

My only quibble here - and it's a minor quibble at that, it has nothing to do with the music - is that if Cathedral had thought to go right back to some of the cultural roots of doom metal, to the world of Italian director Mario Bava and UK cult actor Barbara Steele and draw inspiration from the films they made, together and separately, the musicians would have found enough not just to enrich "Endtyme" but to keep them going for a couple other albums; another possibility would have been to seek out the dark folk rock of early Seventies band Comus and draw inspiration from that band.

It should be noted at the beginning that doom of this sort is, by its very nature, drenched in Sabbath, so those requiring a full revelation should accept their loss and move on. Endtyme’s brilliance comes not by way of new design, but the revival of spirit that moves this album: it’s entirely Sabbath-esque, in terms of scope and quality as well as sound. More rooted in midlife Sab than the birth pangs of the first album or Paranoid, Endtyme mixes more conventional heavy rock songs (“Melancholy Emperor”, “Whores to Oblivion”, “Sea Serpent”) with lengthy experimental epics (“Ultra Earth” and the jarring “Templar’s Arise! (The Return)”), all driven by an fantastic/apocalyptic tone that makes the Cathedral of 2001 more authentic than a thousand fuzzbox bands. The songwriting here is superb, offering a deep understanding of the abysses Sabbath was probing, so much so that, given shriller vocals, Endtyme emerges as the Sab album that should have followed Technical Ecstacy and sparked a second (or third) golden age of doom. That’s not to say that Lee Dorrian’s vocals here are unsuccessful-while I admit that I wasn’t initially thrilled with his sound (and I haven’t liked his vocals since Forest of Equilibrium, anyway), the vocals on Endtyme do grow on you with repeated plays until you begin to see Dorrian as a critical element of the album’s quality. Dorrian’s vocal approach is still midway between clean and death, but it works much better on a sludgy album like this than on the more groove-dominated Ethereal Mirror. By far the most important element here is the storming, godlike guitar sound, a an absolutely monstrous tone that weaves devastation when unleashed in the more rocking songs-Billy Anderson should be knighted for his production job, as the guitar is the apex upon which albums like this rise or fall and its sound is perfect here. Even songs that aren’t guitar-based, like the trippy “Astral Queen”, sound great, though, both in sound and execution, and the album is put together with such great highs and lows that every blast of guitar is fully felt, never lingering long enough to inure the listener to its power. Endtyme, it can only be hoped, will mark the beginning of a long run of black genius for this band…it’s not an album that matches, say, Sabotage in terms of inventiveness or influence, but it probably ties it for acquaintance with the End. Definitely worth your dollar.

EndTyme:

(A) An instrumental heavy riff crawl by early doom pioneers, “Trouble”, from their first album “Psalm 9”.
(B) A deliberately misspelt word which doesn’t really exist in the dictionary (but damn well should after this!)
(C) A collection of riffs which reads like some lost malefic ancient tome, each sub-text somehow regarding the end of the world.

Those eccentric lovable four lads of doom have returned, and to oh what manner of soundscape! The two previous episodes to this one lean more towards the much maligned stoner rock than doom in comparison with this lumbering menace! Original members Lee Dorrian and Gary Jennings have always wanted to go back to the ‘roots’ of where they began, snail paced dirges, despondent love-lost driven melodies, blending a most unique doomy and traditional, Sabbathy metal. Endtyme exquisitely time-travels and explores the qualities of their debut EP and LP in favour of a new chunky, thicker heaviness courtesy of sludge-fiend legend Billy Anderson. There is a more stoic and ‘detached’ quality about their flavour of doom however as it is combined subtly with their later style. The purity of its emotional nihilism is perhaps not quite as convincing except in the exultantly dark and beautiful “Requiem For the Sun”, an intricately mournful tale indeed about the inevitable death of our sacred life bringer. Merely hearing Gaz’s melodies during the chorus of Lee’s lyric “Oh warmth of nocturne, come unto me”, trickles ones spine with delicious oozy stuff. Oh yes, Cathedral hath returned – at last!

Other fantastic tracks include the dark heaving cosmic prognostics of “Ultra Earth”, the creeping, pounding intro “Cathedral Flames”, where one might imagine Nero watching Rome burn as the riffs elevate into “Melancholy Emperor”; which is a bit more up tempo and groovy yet with a bridge tempo change riff that gives a clever proverbial nod to a lesser known Black Sabbath track, the soaring doom threnodies of “the Eternal Idol”. There is also the tongue-in cheek amusement of “Whores To Oblivion”, whose chorus riff reminds this listener of Saint Vitus’ masterful tune “Let The End Begin”, which is an irony in itself as they both look towards a man’s or mankind’s desired or imminent cessation.
“Alchemist of Sorrows” is also a great slab of doom with bittersweet melodic acoustic interludes and some wonderfully slightly abstract, lyrics which is typical of Cathedral. To conclude the album, we have the fascinating structural doom monstrosity that is “Templar’s Arise! (The Return)
This tale of the return of the blind dead, fans will remember from the brilliant live song, “Night of the Seagulls”. It comes across like the Doz holding a necromantical gathering of sorts as his entrancing slow paced call of ‘rise’ blends with the morbidly slow corpse dragging and ringing notes of Gaz Jenning’s guitar. One could easily imagine the tale being told in a little pub somewhere, with beers all round, each clinking of ‘cheers and ‘here’s to oblivion’. As the wall of cosmic doom noise recedes, I shall conclude that if this is indeed a taste of oblivion, I shall enjoy revisiting such a place.

(C) Rob Bailey (Written for Terry Parr's Cathedral Coven)