God, I love Dave Pratchett's artwork. For so much of the Cathedral discography, he produced some of the trippiest, most hellacious baroque landscapes, an intentional but unique homage to the fantastic hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. One of my favorites is the album art for this, the follow-up to their 2004 anthology collection The Serpent's Gold. Garden was another post-millennial stomper from the famed UK doom metal pioneers, and first for new label Nuclear Blast. This disc is the Metal Mind Polish import, and to the best of my knowledge is the only extant CD edition of the band's prog-doom experiment available at the moment. These guys have always been obsessed with Hieronymus Bosch and especially his famous The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, whose art proved to be a potent influence on both the band's music and album's visual presence from the very beginning, but this album dives even further into that fascination they have with the incredible, surrealistic underworlds of Bosch.

They wouldn't follow up with another album for another five years, and Garden sounds like an exhaustive exorcism of ambitious songcraft and offbeat atmosphere; it's not amongst the very best of the band's work, but it ranks pretty highly for me, especially because of the level of progginess that these guys were soaking in throughout thue colossal seventy-minute runtime. Get zoned-out into the void with the short spaced-out psychedelic Elder God chant "Dearth AD" that opens the festival, and pushes us straight into the buzzsaw of mid-tempo acid-metal that is "Tree Of Life & Death"; Dorrian is invoking his most Tom Fischer-esque roar to excellent effect, while the band is grinding out a simple but bangin' mix of Frostian crush and 70's swing, but as it picks up steam more trippy effects and descents into slo-mo crush and wah-damaged devil-boogie. Hammer horror vibes swirl around "North Berwick Witch Trials" and its gnarly lead guitar hook, turning this rocker into one of Garden's catchiest songs, shades of "Magic Mountain"-style earwormery.

Some of this stuff sports some of the most gargantuan Frost influence I've heard outta these guys, especially on cuts like "Upon Azrael's Wings", "Beneath A Funeral Sun " with its spectral childlike backing voices, and the absolute rampager "Oro The Manslayer" (before it breaks into some wild witch-folk ambience) - the To Mega Therion LP must have been playing all the time at the Cathedral pad when they were writing and recording this, and that fusion of their Frostian influence with the 1970's rock swagger, vintage doom metal, some dope NWOBHM gallop, and those weirder psychedelic / prog rock elements really pushes this towards the upper echelons of my list of fave Cathedral albums. Again, dense instrumentation fuels the deliria, with Melloton, auto harp, flutes, violins, and more all swirling in the mix. The ridiculously titled "Corpsecycle" even dips into grungy pop , and crawls with killer riffs; classical strings and earth proggy folk acoustics drift through the instrumental "Fields Of Zagara"; "Sun" works in some prog interludes that remind me of something Canterbury; and Garden is a goddamn riff-feast , that is for sure, pal. This shit is killer.

But it drops you into an unexpected morass of slow-motion drone metal trance when "The Garden" kicks in, and I'm suddenly following the band through a weird hedge-maze of rumbling amplifier drone, lush female-fronted prog-folk, monstrous chug-a-thon metallic crush of the highest order; the almost half hour long song weaves this way and that, an ambitiously convoluted descent into their zonked-out headspace.....it's awesome, really. One of those Frostian battering ram grooves will drop out into something reminiscent of early King Crimson, time signature changes and wild structures scrambling your ears, spooky atmosphere billowing out of the speakers between bouts of atavistic sledgehammer violence, bizarre art-rock forays, and eruptions of FX-soaked amp-roar that drifts into Nik Turner-esque spaces. One of the weirdest and wildest Cathedral songs in their quiver. On top of all that, the reissue adds a bonus song "Proga - Europa" onto the end of this edition, a mere minute of rippin' psych rock that just feels like it just wandered in from some point adjacent to 1977.

The digipak for the Polish Metal Mind reissue includes a fairly in depth essay on what the band was doing at this moment in their career, and includes the entire original lyric booklet.