SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: JOHN CARPENTER – CATHEDRAL

JOHN CARPENTER
CATHEDRAL
SACRED BONES RECORDS 

John Carpenter has long been known for turning nightmares into something tangible. For Carpenter’s new album, Cathedral, this is no different. In many ways, it grimly depicts a setting befitting of recent times. Here, the nightmares are etched into stones, a dark elegy for the abandoned, and the heaviest material Carpenter has put together in years.

From the beginning, Cathedral feels like a dream; one that is filled with uncomfortable spaces you are not sure you want to venture into. Where every space remembers every death, every scream, every tear for the ones lost, and the storied patience of every person that has had to go through such ordeals paints its old walls, searching for acceptance or absolution beneath the glow of stained glass windows, the uncertainty of what lies beyond, and the sadness that colours the hearts of those that would rather forget then live with the memory of loss. “Primeval,” “Identity,” and “Inside Out,” are the first of many layered moments of this journey. Inspired by a vivid nightmare Carpenter had in 2024, Carpenter began building an album that served as a unique narrative tool to tell this story. With each track aligned with Carpenter’s first original graphic novel, Cathedral serves as a dualistic, audiovisual mythology in which the story and its soundscapes are one.

“Abandoned Cathedral,” “Elevator,” and “Elevator Two” continue to tell this story. Intense and gritty, each of these holds a sense of empathy within its delicate synth piano or subtle orchestral moments, showing that even if one does not own this graphic novel, you can feel the story in your ears. Towering, emotionally gravid, and strangely beautiful all at once, the experience of closing one’s eyes and feeling the music is as close to a Carpenter film as one can get within the musical architecture he has built.

“Desolation In The Underworld,” “The Mapmaker,” and “The Ferryman” further tap into Carpenter’s use of haunted synth beauty, blood-curdling guitar riffs, deeply imbued percussive energies, and the vastness of the production on these not only makes one feel the sense of dread echoing from its keys, but there is a melancholic weight to it that is meant to be loud, inescapable, and painfully memorable.
“Lord of The Underground,” “Death of the Mapmaker,” and “Back to Ruins” dive into this classic metallic heaviness while effortlessly weaving in these ethereal synths. Carpenter has always been an artist who has understood instrumental music as an art form and has explored horror as an underlying force to further drive home the kind of disorienting volume that can only exist in such dark spaces. Cathedral takes this approach and drags it into heavier territories, shaped by the trio of Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies. While it’s not an album meant to be a metal record, this musical narrative certainly becomes one further down the line, evolving track to track as Davies answers back to Carpenter’s instrumental skeleton with visceral, reverberating riffs. This isn’t what one would consider metal in a “genre-purist” sense of the word, but in a tectonic way, it makes sense, and it works.

“Revenge” and “Resolution” end this journey, as synths and violin strings bob and weave through Davies’s quaking guitar riffs, with drums echoing within its archaic structures, ending the album gracefully. Cathedral ends as a monumental force built from the shadows and the pressure of something dark awakening beneath the surface. Carpenter has always excelled at the “less is more” approach to music, but it is here in Cathedral that this discipline is used to build something claustrophobic and heavy. It’s not just music that follows the listener; it surrounds them.

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