Released: 2005
After being attached to Earache for virtually their entire career, Cathedral moved into a new era with their debut for Nuclear Blast, and it would have been hard for them to have made a better start. Not only have they made possibly their best ever album, they have done it by stripping back to a raw, almost dirty sound and turned into a somewhat more angrier band.
The Garden of Unearthly Delights is the true classic that Cathedral long promised but never quite delivered. The crux of it is “The Garden”, a track so long it is virtually an album unto itself, an immense 27-minuteepic that is rather like all of the best aspects of the band’s entire discography compressed into one enormous, sprawling beast of a track. At various stages slow then rocking, ponderous then riff-roaring, delicate then dark, disjointed then catchy, discordant then melodic, and combining every facet of their sound from folk to psychedelia to bone-shaking doom, “The Garden” is quite feasibly the greatest doom epic of all time. This track alone would win The Garden of Unearthly Delights a very high score, but the rest of the album is just as good.
“Corpsecycle” is pure Black Sabbath worship from the one band who really knows how to do it, “The Tree of Life and Death” is built on a massively distorted bass line that thumps away at the back of the skull with a monstrously slow section that hearkens back to The Forest of Equilibrium, however briefly, and the mostly instrumental “Oyo the Manslayer” is the ultimate stoner-doom jam.
As fine as all their releases have been, Cathedral finally made the album of their career here, a gigantic slab of a record that raised the bar for all doom bands to come.
- Dearth AD 2005
- Tree of Life and Death
- North Berwick Witch Trials
- Upon Azrael's Wings
- Corpsecycle
- Fields of Zagara
- Oro the Manslayer
- Beneath a Funeral Sun
- The Garden
- Proga-Europa
Rating: 97%
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