After nearly a quarter century, 10 albums, a major-label stint, and a deserved reputation as an act that helped pull doom metal from its stylistic exile, exactly how will Cathedral end its final album? That’s the question that hovers above The Last Spire, the excellent eight-track LP that will mark the end of the long-running, ever-restless English quartet. Early last year, Cathedral played their final show in Australia before returning to England to chart their own demise. For the last two decades, the band has pushed far beyond the slow-growing and wide-set roots of its foundational debut, 1991’s Forest of Equilibrium, to incorporate thrash blitzes, psychedelic tangents and 70s rock bombast. Talking through each entry in the band’s catalogue with Terrorizer earlier this year, frontman Lee Dorian acknowledged the deliberate nature of his band’s non-linear development. Sometimes they wanted to retreat from doom, and sometimes they wanted to retreat into it. “I hate complacency,” he said. “It’s not something you should ever feel, especially in terms of art.”
That perspective has kept Cathedral interesting for the long haul, even if it hasn’t resulted in necessarily great records. For instance, the band’s most recent LP, 2010’s The Guessing Game, spent 85 minutes dipping and diving into prog rock aberrations that sometimes felt excessive and often unnecessary. Cathedral kept twisting free from its traditionally lugubrious mid-tempo maul with an assortment of influences, from Uriah Heep to Genesis. Mostly, it made you wish Cathedral would just settle back in to doom again.
And for a moment at the close of The Last Spire, it seems that Cathedral will indeed exit with a sentimental reminder than that they’ve generally been more than a simply gloomy squadron. “This Body, Thy Tomb”, the final song, opens with a low-strung, generously distorted riff, which Dorian pairs with appropriately funereal imagery: “I exist in this coffin,” he opens from a backlit pulpit. “Murdered trust and misfortune has evolved into strife.” Just past the three-minute mark, though, Dorian and the strangling tone of Garry Jennings go quiet, fading into a series of somber instrumentals-- a twinkling acoustic guitar, a glass-eyed electric solo, a music box melody played on mellotron. Cathedral, it seems, will fade into their own apoptosis.
But the mighty band enters one last time, pounding at Jennings’ lead harder than it has for the entire record. Brian Dixon locks into distended drum rolls and swings hard coming out of them, while keyboardist David Moore and bassist Scott Carlson build steep walls around the riff, conjuring claustrophobia even while heading for the exit. No treacle here: Cathedral ends exactly as it started-- heads down in heavy doom. Swansong attachment aside, that return-to-basics approach is one defining characteristic of The Last Spire, an album that reconnects with Cathedral’s beginnings without simply repeating them.
Another is restraint: In an interview with Ghost Cult Magazine published the week after The Last Spire was released, Jennings admitted that the band left a lot of recorded material on the cutting room floor for this album. Of those five omitted tracks, he said, at least one of them was a 30-minute Cathedral farewell that was never finished. At 56 minutes, however, The Last Spire is very much the right length for a band whose most consistent handicap has been not knowing when to say when, or how to move toward the next track or album. No, efficiency has never been Cathedral’s bailiwick, but on The Last Spire, they operate with surprising and newfound economy. They surround lengthy tracks with much shorter ones and generally just get out of their own way. The first half of the record, for instance, moves as swiftly as anything Cathedral has ever done. A terrifying introduction of swelling field recordings, tolling church bells and grating noise passes quickly into “Pallbearer”, a 12-minute anthem that pauses just enough for an acoustic interlude before sprinting headlong into a burst of thrash. It’s an extended number, but Cathedral anchors shifting momentum to a grim mantra00 “War, famine, drought, disease!”-- and a center of doom gravity. You almost want it to keep going, a rare quality for this band. “Cathedral of the Damned”, meanwhile, crisscrosses samples between verses, choruses and solos, while “Tower of Silence” adds a dose of punk ire to its unfettered seven-minute march. By not pausing to take stock of its progress, Cathedral testifies to its true purpose and power.
The Last Spire is so close to the spirit of Cathedral’s earliest works that Dorian has said it’s the record he’s hoped to make since their debut, Forest of Equilibrium. Importantly, though, it does not feel like a microwaved visitation with the past or some self-obsessed tribute. Rather, these pieces sound like the work of a band hoping to fortify their legacy at the end of their career rather than simply prolong it. The last two decades of exploration reappear here, certainly-- listen for the sidewinding second guitar in the distance during “Tower of Silence”, or, more obviously, the playful and possibly avoidable keyboard-and-bass fantasy that sits at the center of the otherwise morose “An Observation”. But these are simply the positive after-effects of years of auditory experimentation, not the driving force for the record itself. They’ve got too much to fit into an hour for self-involved excess.
If The Last Spire is the end of Cathedral, it’s a lofty exit for a band that’s often tripped over its own artistic ambition and unease. These eight tracks serve as a swift, sinister reminder of why Cathedral mattered at the start and why they intrigued for so many years in the middle. When it mattered the most, they had the sense to recognize that their work was done and to experience the end with dignity-- and, thankfully, doom.
