Cathedral

Endtyme (Earache)
by Martin Popoff

After a long absence due to unspecified personal stuff, Lee Dorrian and his unique doom proposition are back with an album that takes the high road, Cathedral refusing to write catchy, immediate stoner rock anthems, instead preferring art-damaged collages of thick smoke-choked riffs strafed with Dorrian’s nuthouse roar.

Indeed, much of Endtyme (loosely based on apocalyptic heedings, including those of an environmental variety) is slow to develop, and once there, somewhat opaque and confusing, Dorrian finding ways to be creative within this beast of a genre he created (and then procreated, through his thriving Rise Above label), embracing the atonal, the underground, and the obstinately uncommercial. Whether the direction works on the street seems irrelevant to this increasingly eccentric stoner icon, Dorrian more concerned with getting back to the experimental de-speeded grind that made them such a remarkable new sound in the early ’90s.
(43 West 38th St. New York, NY 10018)