+ Church Of Misery + The Gates Of Slumber

Doom metal band Cathedral hail from Coventry, England. The band was founded in 1989 by Lee Dorrian (former vocalist of grindcore pioneers Napalm Death) Mark ‘Griff’ Griffiths (a Carcass roadie) and Garry ‘Gaz’ Jennings (former member of thrash metal band Acid Reign).

Their early sound consisted of very heavy and slow doom metal and was released through Lee Dorrian’s indie label Rise Above records. Later on they began to incorporate elements of progressive rock into their sound.

The only original band members in the current line up are Lee Dorrian and Gaz Jennings, although Jennings did once leave the band in their early history, only to rejoin shortly afterwards. Bassist Leo Smee and drummer Brian Dixon now join the two original members.

Lee Dorrian spoke of Cathedral saying: “When we first started, the music of Cathedral was a lot more extreme than it is now, a lot more morose and depressing, because that’s how we felt at the time. We’d all come out of the death metal scene, or the grindcore scene or whatever, and I was just as much into the slower stuff as I was into the faster stuff. I just wanted to do something a bit different, so we took all our influences like Vitus and Pentagram and the Obsessed and stuff and decided to take that kind of music one step further, bring it into the nineties, make it more extreme, more heavy and down tuned than any of those bands had done before. That was our first and foremost ambition, and I think we probably achieved that when we did our first album”.

To date, the band have released a total of eight full-length studio albums and have recently announced that they will be releasing their ninth album The Guessing Game on 26th March 2010.

Cathedral will be performing live at Manchester Academy 3 on Monday 26th April.