In contrast with later Cathedral recordings there is not much evidence of 1970s prog rock here; there’s actually more of an English late 60s/early 70s folk vibe throughout this album which suggests an alternative direction Cathedral could have pursued. I’m thinking of something along the lines of the early 70s English folk band Comus whose music, at least on their first album ‘First Utterance’, featured rape, murder, a lynching and derangement by electro-shock therapy, and whose song ‘Drip Drip’ supplied the Swedish BM group Opeth inspiration for an album title with the line: ‘… as I carry you to your grave, my arms your hearse …’; and of the soundtrack to the original ‘The Wicker Man’ movie which featured Christopher Lee wearing silly wigs and eye candy lady Britt Ekland. It’s a pity in a way that Cathedral chose to go in a more kitschy retro-70s direction and wasted that magnificent sound of theirs while other bands picked up the minimalist droning doom metal idea with its potential for creating really trancey droning music; I’m sure there is still an opening for a British doom metal band like Cathedral to pick up the idea of combining doom metal with evil English or Scottish folk music and folklore and running off with it. I know the band did flirt briefly with a bit of English folklore and history later when they did the song ‘Hopkins’ but this was pretty much a homage to the UK band Witchfinder General that was based as much on the movie about the infamous 17th century self-styled witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins that starred Vincent Price as on the actual man himself. @NausikaDalazBlindaz
If we place Candlemass on the top of the doom metal kingdom, the viceroy position would see quite a bit of competition before being taken; some fans will prefer to spend the rest of their lives in Solitude Aeturnus; others will start worshipping at the altar of this mythical Saint Vitus; some will be looking for Trouble elsewhere, while a fair amount of metalheads will tattoo huge Pentagrams on their bodies… Still, one large portion of the doom metal fandom will remain with eyes fixed upon The Isles, and will try to solve this trilemma comprising the following behemoths: Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, and Cathedral. If the former may be bypassed due to their wide meanderings around the metal spectre, not necessarily staying true to the genre, and The Brides occupy a niche of their own with their not very imitable elegiac, melancholic style, then the latter seem like the most logical choice for this proverbial post… @bayern
rafazardly 