The Guessing Game

The Guessing Game arrived about four and a half years after The Garden of Unearthly Delights: Cathedral's ninth album and their second for Nuclear Blast. After the 27-minute "The Garden" the band were unsure where to go next, and once the touring was done they spent about a year away from it. Lee Dorrian and Garry Jennings then began writing again in London, but the first album's worth of songs they came up with was slow, heavy doom in the manner of their debut; they set it aside unrecorded and decided to make the record they had always wanted to make. Only "Requiem for the Voiceless" survived from those sessions, kept because the drummer liked it so much. The songs went to Leo Smee and Brian Dixon in March 2009. It was recorded in November 2009 at Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire, again with Warren Riker producing. Four songs were written in the studio itself, "The Running Man", "Edwige's Eyes", "The Casket Chasers" and the title track, a Mellotron-led piece that was meant to have vocals until time ran out. The stay lasted about a month, the band's longest ever; the vocals were cut in the last few days, into the early hours, and Riker took the tapes home to mix in the United States. Dorrian said the double album was never the plan: it came down to losing half the songs or putting out two discs. Alison O'Donnell of the Irish folk-rock group Mellow Candle sings on "Funeral of Dreams" and "Cats, Incense, Candles & Wine", and Mellotron and sitar join the riffs. Dorrian explained the title as the guessing game of life itself: people justifying their existence through religion, wealth or power. Dave Patchett's painting opens out into a huge question mark that holds a story of human evolution, and a hidden track at the end of the second disc has Patchett talking about it. "Requiem for the Voiceless" is an animal-rights song from a singer who has been vegetarian since the age of 11, and "Journey Into Jade" tells the band's own story at twenty years. The album came out in Europe on 26 March 2010, in the UK on 29 March and in North America on 20 April; Trooper Entertainment's Japanese edition followed on 19 May. The Guardian wrote that doom had rarely sounded so joyous. In 2026, with the rights back with the band, Rise Above Records announced The Guessing Game (Rethink), a full remix from the original masters by Jaime Gomez Arellano, for release on 30 October 2026. Spotify carries this album, but none of its tracks will play in this territory, so this page shows the sleeve instead of a player (checked on 14 October 2026).