Cathedral-The carnival bizarre (Earache Classic re-issue)

Earache
1995/2008

I remember being curious about Cathedral when they popped in the early 1990’s. I liked the tone on albums like “The forest of Equilibrium” and “The Ethereal Mirror”, but they always seem to wander around without enough structure to really make them that interesting. Heavy sludge is all and well and good, but Cathedral seem to be drowning in it rather than being able to manipulate their sound. However by “The Carnival Bizarre” they seemed to be realizing the need for some real direction and they kept the same rich tones they had been doing for several years and plugged them into a much tighter format which is a whole lot easier to take. Maybe this wasn’t their original vision, but the flow on this album was steady and interesting. This change in approach was a far cry from the almost unbearable crawl of their earlier releases. Lee Dorian’s vocals were a bit more level and actually more effective here because they compliment the music instead of just kind of floating around. The Sabbath influence was more recognizable here, but Cathedral were making their own path to some extent with a pitch that was very much doom yet different as well. This album sounds as intriguing now as it did 13 years ago and holds up rather nicely. This re-issue also includes a DVD which has “Our God has landed” which includes 8 promo clips and five songs from a show in 1992 of “The gods of Grind tour”.