Wasn’t a huge fan of the previous demos from Cardinals Folly, which were a little too black-metal-sounding for me, but I really want this to be good. Maybe it’s unfair to expect this outfit to fill the void left by another Finnish doom trio named after a quirky religious figure… but at least on paper, you’d think Cardinals Folly would sound pretty sweet.
On CD (or in this case, on my laptop), it’s a slightly different story. The album actually begins with four minutes of evil religious chanting, before “Morbid Glory” gives us some blackened buzzsaw riffing that nearly drowns out the atonal vocals. This song does have a couple decent doom-metal breakdowns (in eight minutes!), but that’s about it. “The Black Baroness” picks up the pace just a bit, sounding a little like some subpar Candlemass demo, albeit with Satanic lyrics. If they were given any kind of recording budget this time around, they didn’t seem to use it—capturing the same raw, black-metal sound of their demos. Not something that really works well for doom, IMO… You gotta hear the bass, man!
Alas, this band still sounds like a bargain-basement Reverend Bizarre at best. I’m probably not gonna bother with their next release.
