The Last Spire

Cathedral made their tenth album knowing it would be their last. On 6 February 2011 the band from Coventry announced that they would release one more record and then stop, and this one was recorded well after that. Rise Above Records issued it in Britain and Metal Blade Records in North America on 29 April 2013. Lee Dorrian has compared the ending to holding a funeral for the band. Deciding to stop first meant they no longer had anything to prove and could make the record entirely on their own terms; he has also said it would have been far harder to bear had they finished without an album they were happy with, or broken up in a row for no reason at all. The music goes back to the slow, sinking side of their 1991 debut, Forest of Equilibrium. Dorrian has called it the album he had wanted to make ever since that first one, and said it almost feels as though they made their second record last. Much more material was recorded and a great deal of it was left off to keep this shape. Nick Green of Decibel wrote that few bands get to write their own epitaph in such vivid and exacting terms. The order here is the standard eight tracks; the Japanese edition adds "Tombs of the Blind Dead" for nine.