Review Summary: Tales from the crypt
In the modern zeitgeist where franchises are fatigued with endless continuations and bands have become institutions past their prime, I admire Cathedral for being one of the few that has died and stayed dead. But for how prolific and idiosyncratic they could often be in their heyday, I’m not opposed to rummaging through whatever undiscovered treasures are in their decrepit vaults. So when the band announced the unearthing of a half-hour epic that they recorded in 2013 and just sort of forgot about… yeah, that sounds exactly like something they would do.
While the resulting Society’s Pact With Satan may not match the all-out weirdness of a past sprawl like “The Voyage Of The Homeless Sapien,” it still manages to cover a number of tempo shifts across twenty-nine minutes. It inevitably shares the most DNA with 2013’s The Last Spire, evoking a similar scope of majestic decay as its opening ambient fuzz gives way to an intermingling doom crawl and vocal/organ call and response. Things get understandably nonlinear from there but the tug o’ war between crunchy upbeat stomps and slow dives ends up being effective.
Overall, Cathedral unearths much of what we knew and loved about them with Society’s Pact With Satan. While it isn’t quite at the level of their most essential listens, it would’ve made a cool companion piece to The Last Spire had it been released at the time and the individual components are strong enough to make the whole feel cohesive. The band also feels tight, not quite pushing the boundaries in the same way as their more eccentric genre jumps but offering plenty of power along the way. I still don’t want the band to come back in full capacity, but snippets like this make it fun to ponder what else could’ve been left behind.
