The Last Spire is the aptly titled final effort of legendary doom rock act Cathedral, and the band certainly don't just lay down and die. Instead, they strongly march toward their grave with solemn faces and drag you, perfectly alive and well, along with them into the coldest depths of their resting place.
Nothing about this record is in a hurry; it's a long haul from the opening calls to bring out your dead to finally laying down on a cold stone slab in a musty crypt and closing your eyes to die. After the cloudy and chaotic calls the introductory "Entrance to Hell" brings, "Pallbearer" grabs you and begins the slow dive all the way down. Just from these two songs, you'll gather that there's a lot more strange and terrifying ambiance going on here with keyboards and choir-type deals. Think along the lines of 2005's Garden of Unearthly Delights, but a whole lot more scary.
The prominent sound in the realm of ambiance are bells and chimes, which makes sense given the very funeral mass feel of the record, but there's a lot of horn-and-string combinations thrown around as well. Strange as it sounds, the whole combination gives off an almost grainy, horror-movie effect with a side of confusion and foggy premonitions. It's a record to put on in the dark and legitimately psych yourself out into fearing everything that could be around you; that's how good of a job Cathedral did here.
All the feel-talk and ambiance aside, the music is sick. It's overtly doomy with nothing to hide, but there are plenty of other things going on so the record doesn't just drone from start to finish. Longer tracks like "Pallbearer" and "An Observation" manage to make their ten-or-eleven-minute selves interesting with a variety of acoustic guitars, instrumental interludes, and straight up rock without overstaying their welcomes at any point. Hell, there's even some faster stuff in there just to break it up, but at the end of the day it's nothing less than what you'd expect from a standard Cathedral record: big ass sounds slowly crushing you to death.
Then there's the last track of Cathedral's career, "This Body, Thy Tomb," which wraps up the record just so nicely. Slower than a really slow thing, it drudges onward to an inevitable end, and then breaks down into a cloud of feedback and static… but doesn't fade out. As quickly as you've taken this trip down to hell, life cuts out and you're left in complete silence after the deafening noise.
Just like life, it's over before you know it.
8/10
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