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CATHEDRAL
Society’s Pact With Satan EP

Rise Above (2025)
Rating: 9/10

As soon as I heard this was a lost Cathedral song from the sessions of the UK band’s final full-length studio opus The Last Spire (2013), my mind immediately envisioned a scenario similar to the classic 80s horror movie The Evil Dead. My imagination ran wild; a dilapidated old house with a dust-smogged attic. An old rocking chair creaking due to the draught, strewn oddments, cobwebbed books, yellowed documents and there, in the corner, in an old chest, a mould speckled cassette, handed down like some ancient and precious artefact and finding its way into a recording studio.

Of course, the real explanation is more prosaic in that this solitary 30 minute track, ‘Society’s Pact With Satan’, was rediscovered by producer Jaime Gómez Arellano while digging through some old recordings, but the whole look, feel and sound of this release suggests this song was recorded in some secret banqueting hall in a Rothschild-esque mansion. Maybe it’s down to the 1970s cover photo that I’m transported back to the clandestine activities of some wealthy underground cult as frontman Lee Dorrian barks a satanic sermon over the stale waft of esoteric books and black candle wax.

This is as grandiose as heavy metal gets, unravelling like some brown tinted scroll yet not once sacrificing its bone-shuddering weight which bears down like the most leaden of storm clouds which crush the skull with their dirty humidity. Doom metal has never sounded so arcane, so archaic and so Sabbathian and yet daubed in the mystical stuffiness of Dennis Wheatley via The Devil Rides Out.

As you’d expect with Cathedral, when the riffs come they creep and slither like some half-hinted yet looming H.P. Lovecraft manifestation, leering from the fig and leaving its slimy trail across the lush red corridor carpet. Dorrian is the ghoulish general, spouting comms of anguish in slow motion to the antiquated pendulum strikes of the drum.

Throughout such an expansive and sprawling spectacle of horror, there are, of course, gradual shifts almost like different phases of a ritual as each tidal slab cracks ever greater, causing the wooden banisters of the grand winding staircase to bow. The lyrics, however, aren’t as cheesily evil as one might imagine. Instead, they are a stark warning and commiserations towards a broken world looted and raped by a satanic hierarchy. It’s almost as if Black Sabbath’s classic song ‘War Pigs’ has been transformed into a Luciferian odyssey, dropping from every contour with mildew as an assembly of darkly cloaked figures gather to perversely leer at the next sacrificial lamb.

Do not dare skip through such an orgy of doom, instead sink into your couch and become one with the ebbs and flows of a soundtrack that may well be the last thing you ever hear from the mighty Cathedral. Or maybe this could be the jab Dorrian and company needs to kick-start their career again? Whatever the case, this is a feast of gargantuan riffs and expertly crafted doom stirrings which act as a reminder of just how good Cathedral were, and how relevant they remain within a genre that is now jam packed with dull, marijuana-soaked sound-alike’s and wizard worshipping hipsters.

Neil Arnold

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