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Cathedral: Statik majik

07/08/04  ||  Statik Majik

Over fourty minutes of heavy riffing and killer tunes. And it’s a fucken ep. With 4 songs. And surprisingly it costs as much as regular ep’s. Now that’s what I call something worth the money spent. Sometimes I feel abit disappointed when buying a deathmetal cd with approx. 10 tracks which is less than thirty minutes and paying full price for it. I think that cd’s should be priced by their length, not by the amount of the songs there is. But (un)fortunatelly I don’t make the prices. If I would, albums by The Project Hate MCMXCIX would cost at least 40 euros. Ok, nevermind the amount/length comparison.

First track, “Midnight Mountain”, is taken from the “Ethereal Mirror” album which was released year before “Statik Majik”. The rest of the songs are brand new ones. Now that’s what I like. I would’ve liked it even more if they would have replaced the “Midnight Mountain” with another new track. I already heard it before, for fucks sakes. Why put the same songs on two releases? It’s not a remix or a live song, it’s the same fucken song.

And now that I got that off my chest, let me tell you that was the only bad thing I can come up from this ep. Unless it’s not yet obvious, I happen to like Cathedral. And this ep. Alot.

After the quite useless “Midnight Mountain” comes “Hypnos 164”. The guitar feedback in the intro fucken irritates me. Big time. I swear the fucken god that Whitman probably heard exactly the very same sound in his head before he snapped and started firing his rifle from the campus tower. If you skip the intro (recommended), you’ll notice that this song has the groove every Cathedral fan loves. “That looked to me like it was from another planet“. Yeah, right. Suites you, sir. And the song too.

And then the next track, “Cosmic Funeral”. They even made a weird video from this song. Does that make the song good? Nope. What makes it good is that it’s a Cathedral song. But out of the three new songs in this ep, this is the weakest. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t suck. It just pales in comparison to the other songs.

“The voyage of the homeless sapien” is probably the song that makes this ep so damn interesting. About 22 minutes long experience. Well if you skip the rather useless few minutes of random noise in the end, it’s “only” 18-19 minutes. Usually I am not such a big fan of songs that are longer than 10 minutes, and there are only few bands that can do long AND interesting songs. With style. The Project Hate is one of them, thank you very much. And so is Cathedral. Just listen to the damn song and you’ll hear what I mean. One thing that bothers me though is that what the fuck is it with seagulls and Cathedral? They refer to seagulls in this song, and even in the “Carneval Bizarre” album. Must be an inside joke. Or maybe one line from “The Voyage” explains it all: “Nature and smoking be our mate…” Nuff said.

I would’ve given this “album” probably an 8,5 but thanks for one useless track I had to take half points off. So…

8 /10.

  • Information
  • Released: 1994
  • Label: Earache
  • Website: www.cathedralcoven.com
  • Band
  • Lee Dorrian: vocals
  • Gaz Jennings: guitar, bass
  • Adam Lehan: guitar
  • Mark Wharton: drums
  • Tracklist
  • 01. Midnight Mountain
  • 02. Hypnos 164
  • 03. Cosmic Funeral
  • 04. The Voyage of the Homeless Sapien
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