The Formative Years – Cathedral
When it comes to marrying the gloomy and sombre spirit of bands like Pentagram and with Black Sabbath worship and protracted, heavy doom metal, Cathedral’s debut album “Forest of Equilibrium” is a classic that raised the bar in 1991.
Starting with the fantastically twisted Hieronymus Bosch-esque cover artwork and a cheery intro, the sub-par production of the album only adds depth to the spacey, lost atmosphere, which is counterpointed by overpowering avalanches of crushing guitars, pierced by grandiosely plodding drums that are buried and obscured by reverb and Lee Dorian’s overdubbed bizarrely moaned, miserable vocal delivery.
While the Forest of Equilibrium’s depressive blur of comforting distortion is a tour de force in terms of heaviness, the melodic, grooving yet inherently darkly hypnotic, serpentine guitarwork along with the occasional odd instrumentation and all the imperfections of this album set it apart from the rest of the epigones by adding an eerily suffocating and magical touch.
The legacy of heaviness known as “Forest of Equilibrium” took what was known as doom metal, slowed it further down to a foreboding, sorrow conjuring, catatonic, tortured crawl resulting in a sonically compressed power akin to thick molten all-consuming hot lead threatening to immerse us all.
Forest of Equilibrium took doom to its extreme and has stood the test of time as a monolith of dread.
