This weekend I’ll mostly be listening to… Cathedral

Before it gets a bit sedate musically on the Lounge, a bit polite, a bit … middle aged even let’s shake it up by bringing in a bunch arriving at… er… middle-age themselves… with Cathedral, bizarre offshoot from the immortal (immortal for some, let it be noted) grindcore (don’t ask) band Napalm Death. Because Cathedral, who one suspects Lee Dorrian et al started as a bit of a lark after he left ND, have now been going since 1989. And going in quite a style, combining doom metal with… well, almost any other genre that comes to mind, albeit in tiny measured doses. If that sounds a bit like a stoner approach, as it happens it is. There are clear aesthetic linkages to the larger stoner scene. Black Sabbath like riffs? Check. Downtuned? Check. Hints of punk? Check. But… there’s a lot of humour in Cathedral which perhaps mitigates that. My favourite album of theirs is the mid-90s Supernatural Birth Machine which as the following selection of tracks will demonstrate isn’t quite as serious as a lot of doom metal. And also has that punk edge. Mind you, I’ve never quite understood the curious logo they use… like… why Irish styled text?

Enjoy!

Suicide Asteroid

Fireball Demon

Stained Glass Horizon… I’d have preferred to have Urko’s Conquest (you’ve got to love the cry at the end, ‘Planet of the Apes’… for those in the audience who didn’t get the Urko reference… or perhaps for those who did) but YouTube appear to have pulled the track.

Autumn Twilight (from Soul Sacrifice or Statik Majik, I cannot remember which).