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Dec 6, 20225 min read

Cathedral - Forest of Equilibrium (1991)

Updated: Dec 6, 2022

𝐅𝐑𝐎𝐌 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐂𝐑𝐘𝐏𝐓𝐒 - 𝐂𝐄𝐋𝐄𝐁𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐏𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐁𝐔𝐌 𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐄𝐒 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐃 𝐑𝐎𝐂𝐊 & 𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐕𝐘 𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐀𝐋…



On December 6, 1991, Cathedral released their debut full-length studio album Forest of Equilibrium via Earache Records.



Considered a classic in its genre of Doom Metal, Forest of Equilibrium was notably inducted into Decibel Magazine's Hall of Fame in February 2006, being the 12th inductee for the Decibel Hall of Fame.


“…I can say without a doubt that some people are going to be surprised with some of the material.” — Lee Dorian on Forest of Equilibrium prior to its release. (1991 interview with Baphomet zine, issue #6/7)
“One of the main appeals of Doom Is its simplIcIty. It has a very non egotistical style, despite often being sometimes extreme, but I will not accept the fact that most Doom bands can't play, because the music is of a rather basic formula, It gives the musicians much more scope to show their real talents.” — Lee Dorian on comments on that Doom is simplistic and the musicians who play that style lack the skill to play more complex forms of Metal. (1991 interview with Baphomet zine, issue #6/7)

Background:

In 1989, Lee Dorrian left Napalm Death because he was reportedly tiring of the Punk scene and did not like the Death Metal direction which Napalm Death was taking.


(Lee Dorrian with Napalm Death)


The idea for Cathedral came about after Lee Dorrian and Carcass roadie Mark “Griff” Griffiths met and discussed their love for bands like Black Sabbath, Candlemass, Pentagram, Trouble, and Witchfinder General, while getting hammered on British cider, brown weed.



In 1992, Dorrian talked with Marco Barbieri about how it all came together, and this is what he had to say;

“…about six months later (after the split with Napalm Death). It wasn’t intentional (forming Cathedral). No one I knew was into slow, heavy stuff. Only Griff (Mark Griffiths), who did the slide show at the Carcass shows, who I knew through Bill (Steer). One night, we got drunk and decided to get a band together like St. Vitus. We thought it was a good idea, but we were drunk. There’s only like 4 or 5 people into that kind of music in England.”

(Promotional poster for Forest of Equilibrium)


Cathedral was founded in 1989 by Dorrian and Griffiths, with Garry “Gaz” Jennings (formerly of Thrash Metal band Acid Reign) and Adam Lehan coming into the fold. According to Dorrian, only Winter or Autopsy were doing something similar, sound-wise, at the time.

“No one we knew was into this stuff except Gary (Gaz Jennings), who I met earlier when Danny (Lilker) of Nuclear Assault introduced me. He (Gaz) was into Black Sabbath and Witchfinder General. Two years later Griff wrote him a letter and asked him if he wanted to join since Acid Reign had broken up. He brought Adam along.”

As Dorrian explains, the band's original sound was a product of the immediate musical environment combined with the band members' influences;

“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 90's, make it more extreme, more heavy and downtuned 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 (Forest of Equilibrium).”

Promotion:


A music video was filmed for the song Ebony Tears, which received airplay on MTV's Headbangers Ball.


(Video for Ebony Tears: https://youtu.be/EgbQ3oiMPPc)


Touring:

On November 25, 1991, less than a month before the release of Forest Of Equilibrium, Cathedral played a show at The Barrel Organ in Birmingham, England with Benediction as support, with another show on January 11, 1992 at The Flying Picket in Liverpool, England. This was followed by the bands release of their Soul Sacrifice EP on March 9, 1992.



One week later, on March 16, 1992, Cathedral embarked on the Gods Of Grind Tour, opening for Entombed, Carcass & Confessor. The tour ran until April 5, 1992.



On May 27, 1992, Cathedral began supporting Saint Vitus on their Children of Doom Tour at Blumenwiese in Stuttgart. The final date of this tour was on June 12, 1992.



On August 5, 1992, Cathedral began touring as the opening act for Napalm Death, Carcass & Brutal Truth at Club Babyhead in Providence, Rhode Island on the Campaign For Musical Destruction U.S. Tour . The tour came to a conclusion on September 27, 1992.




(Jeff Walker, Mark "Barney" Greenway, Lee Dorrian, Michael Amott & Dan Lilker. Campaign For Musical Destruction tour 1992.)


Reissue:

In 2009, Earache Records reissued the album along with four "bonus" songs that comprise the long out-of-print 1992 Soul Sacrifice EP.



This deluxe digipak or DualDisc reissue also includes a poster of Dave Patchett's cover art and a new 40-minute documentary entitled Return to the Forest (on DVD for the digipak edition).



Critical Reception:

In his review for AllMusic, Jason Birchmeier wrote;

“Along with the early material chronicled on In Memorium, Forest of Equilibrium remained an artifact of Cathedral's early gloom sound before they eventually evolved into one of the more exciting heavy metal bands of the mid-'90s. Still fresh from his infamous stint as the looming vocalist for the original and most notorious grindcore band ever, Napalm Death, vocalist Lee Dorrian teams up with the guitarist duo of Garry Jennings and Adam Lehan to create some of the most lumbering heavy metal ever heard. The group takes the grinding guitar tones of grindcore and slows them down to a nearly unbearable pace capable to either hypnotizing the listener or inducing sleep. While the two guitarists churn out their doomy guitar riffs, Dorrian does his best to balance the delicate line between singing lyrics with hints of harmony and emanating deathly growls from the depths of his dark soul.
Besides the guitars and vocals, the songs themselves actually deserve some recognition despite their tendency to creep along at a sometimes tedious pace. Ebony Tears and Funeral Request in particular still stand as two of the group's more memorable songs even if this early sound has since been abandoned. In addition to these two songs, Soul Sacrifice deserves some notice as the one song to actually up the album's tempo towards mosh-friendly levels -- though it is much better performed on the succeeding Soul Sacrifice EP.
The ultra-murky sound quality of Forest of Equilibrium also makes it a unique album far different from any of the group's other releases. Like the dense layers of compressed distortion that transform the group's guitar tones into monolithic waves of bone-shaking sound, the poor sound quality gives the album a surreal sense of dense, dusty murk that nearly eclipses the music with a shroud of disorientation. This album doesn't compare to later Cathedral albums such as The Carnival Bizarre in terms of artistry or consistent style, but it does possess an undeniable aura of dark gloom that these later albums can only hope to emulate with their increasingly clean sound and hints of joy.”

Note: The reviews shared here are for historical reference. The views and opinions expressed within are not always supported (in full or in part) by Into the Wells. — E.N. Wells



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