Review: –

Do you like UK hard rock/doom act Cathedral? Do you like box sets? If you’ve answered yes to both of these questions, then it’s your lucky day! For the low, low price of 12 to 24 British Pounds (or 17 to 34 Euros, or 18 to 37 American dollars + whatever outrageous shipping costs your country has), you can own “this legendary underground doom metal demo from 1990!” With five different vinyl pressings, including clear, solid white and black mixed, black, black and clear mixed and exclusive to the US, purple, along with a CD/DVD version to choose from, you’ve got plenty to spend your hard earned pennies on.
More seriously, ‘In Memoriam’ (spelt with a “U” not an “A” as it is on the re-mastered edition) is a fantastic demo, the debut by the now-defunct band. Slow and murky as a swamp, it’s more primeval and lurching than the 1991 full length that followed with ‘Forest Of Equilibrium’. Take a few seconds from your day and check it out online: the four tracks are damn near bordering on death metal, musically lurching with a primitive basement quality. The unusual vocals are spoken word and haunting; the primitivism Lee Dorian brought to Napalm Death (who he’d just quit) remained, albeit in a far different form. The cover of Pentagram’s classic ‘All Your Sins’ is a nice touch, somehow made even heavier due to the suffocating crunch of all the elements within.
So… do you need this revamped and seriously amped up version of ‘In Memoriam’? It depends on several factors: how fat your wallet currently is and if you want all the goodies packed into these types of packages and if you can stomach things that are more cleanly re-mastered when they really didn’t need to be cleanly re-mastered because a lot of their charm lay in their primitive production. Herein are photos and notes and demo live recordings and a DVD of a live performance Cathedral did in Holland and Belgium in 1991. Sound good? If so, go blow some cash or rack up your credit.