A HALLOWEEN BUMMER?
Halloween greets! Fancy another old-skool seasonal selection? Good, because back when Black Sabbath were pre-Reunion uncool and doom was damned-near uninvented as a sub genre of metal, Cathedral put out the four-track EP In Memoriam. Recorded and released on tape in 1990, the record came out in 1994.
Confession: I hadn’t played this record since buying it about 30 years ago, picking it up on the back of a Statik Majik and Carnival Bizarre induction into Lee Dorrian’s lysergic groove-doom congregation in the mid 90s. The reason it went unplayed for so long was this:
It was fckn horrible.
All I really remember is hearing something so slow that it was nauseous. TOO MUCH DOOM, man. I wasn’t ready for that – hell, I barely knew what doom was so In Memoriam got left on the shelf to decompose.
But now, like a good horror cliche, it’s time to contrive a needless stand-off and face this purple demon of record purchases past.
At this time of year, Cathedral’s wicked cocktail of damp magick, witchery and crushing bloody riffage always beckons. The Ethereal Mirror gets a mighty groove on while the proggy tricks and turns in The Guessing Game and The Garden of Unearthly Delights cast a little jester-ish mischief and psychedelia our way. Those albums always work well when nature retreats and daylight shrinks.
In Memoriam is not like those.
It WILL be slow, we know this. But will it still be unlistenable?
[lowers needle to record]
Big surprise – not unlistenable.
Pretty damned riffy, in fact. Did not expect any fast positives on this replay but the sonic wallop from Mourning of a New Day‘s bulldozer opening is absolutely huge, the guitars landing heavy with bending, mournful harmonies that weep melancholic and crunch hard. It’s an unholy downer pushing through banks of cold fog.
A promising start, then. How did this record go so wrong first time round?
[verse starts]
Aaaah …. right. That’s how.
Any downtuned stank-face brung on by that glacial wall-of-morose guitar intro is quickly lost by the motion-destroying trudge that Mourning becomes when it hits the two-minute mark. Slow to the point of distraction, Lee Dorrian’s slug-paced delivery would be comical if it weren’t so painful. A slow vocal is one thing. A vocal so slow you can’t bear it is another … and with nothing else to hook onto, you’re trapped, waiting for something, ANYTHING, to happen.
Maybe this is a sign that I’m really not meant to be here but go check for yourself. Salvation eventually arrives with a shock tempo shift, a groove-metal breakdown and a heroic solo before an abrupt punchy end. Musically, this thing cooks.
Next up is All Your Sins, a Pentagram cover. The riff’s an absolute earworm, no question. But if you hum it to yourself in public at the pace Cathedral play it here – dur nur nur nurrrr nur, dur nur nur nurrrr nur – people will question your sanity. The Pentagram original sounds biker-punk speedy and if you switch In Memoriam to 45 rpm, you get pretty close to Pentagram’s tempo. But maybe just choose the Pentagram version instead.
Flip the disc and Ebony Tears explodes into inaction with huge Sleep-esque bass and more of that beautifully melancholic twin-guitar wall. Very simple, very awesome and very low. WIN. But then, the vocals … see above. Same deal.
No such issue with the closing March because it’s an instrumental, haha. THANKYOUVERYMUCH. Aptly named too, because it is what the title says – a funereal march and a processional groove-free zone to finish.
So, there we go – In Memoriam Listening Party: The Return. Verdict?
I think we’re done with In Memoriam. This doesn’t mean it’s without merit because this EP is part of the Cathedral story and Cathedral are very necessary. But maybe the whole point of In Memoriam – demos for Forest of Equilibrium (still haven’t heard that one), basically – was to be single-minded and obstinate A.F., an extreme extraction from the first-wave of post-Sabbath doomers. Intensely underground in vibe and execution, In Memoriam is music as masochism, as endurance, and its saving grace is it’s only an EP. It’s the pursuit of an absolute – the slowest – which overrides any notion of song, rhythm or rocking out. Like Earth 2, it pioneers but rarely entices – for me, at least.
The bell tolls.
Looking for more enjoyable Halloween-friendly sounds with an oddball twist? Try last year’s Celtic Frost and Captain Beefheart double whammy for avant-metal chills and weirdo art-rock voodoo.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
