ALBUM REVIEW: John Carpenter – Cathedral

Sacred Bones Records

Released: 07.08.26

While tried and tested by many, few have mastered the art of music as a companion piece to additional media quite like director/composer John Carpenter. With a CV spanning six decades, and as varied as The Thing, Halloween, Big Trouble In Little China and Escape From New York, Cathedral is Carpenter’s first graphic novel. Based on a vivid dream the ‘master of horror’ had in 2024, the narrative follows an investigation into a gruesome murder and a supernatural entity living beneath an abandoned cathedral in downtown Los Angeles. Carpenter has described the album as his first heavy metal album while the graphic novel is a suitably dystopian fantasy set in a present day Los Angeles that makes Compton look like Camberwick Green.

Musically (is it even heavy metal? If it is, it’s not very good heavy metal), it all sounds a bit AI and extremely difficult to listen to outside of the context of the visual media, while it is equally difficult to experience both media simultaneously such is the formatting. With the album split into 14 song-sized musical nuggets, they don’t necessarily fit so neatly with the unmarked chapter splits of the 132-pages of the graphic novel.

Opener, Primeval, at five minutes – synths and lone guitar, atmospheric, a bit theme tuney when it gets going – and Identity, at a further three-and-a-half minutes – Gregorian echoes, church organ – set the tone but only across five pages of the story. Elsewhere, Elevator – rockier with an almost disco beat and a decent standalone tune – is only three minutes long but set across a really tense eight pages of storytelling. It’s frustrating as a reader/listener, and I know about ergodics in literature.

But I digress. On a purely musical level Cathedral is poor. Synths and metal don’t really mix well anyway, so while it builds tempo and atmosphere it lacks punch. I’m sure it’s technically good given the people involved but on tracks like Abandoned Cathedral – a horribly low budget organ interlude – or Lord Of The Underground – speed metal with more Gregorian chants – this is a record that fails dismally to challenge the listener on its own merits or peak any further interest in its companion comic book.

Elsewhere tracks like The Mapmaker, The Ferryman and Death Of The Mapmaker hold few musical surprises beyond the press bumf and the only real highlight in the second half of Cathedral is on Revenge – a kind of big song before the last song before the encore set piece – where our musical protagonist belts out his metaphorical revenge via a minor pentatonic solo on the edge of the metaphorical cliff (the abandoned cathedral in the background, natch) while wielding the decapitated head of his supernatural enemy like a ’67 Les Paul Sunburst.

However, I’m sure for graphic novel nerds and soundtrack enthusiasts alike, a certain amount of premature frothing at the mouth for another album from one of cinema’s great musical artists will ensure Cathedral does not diminish an unrivalled Hollywood career for its creator. What a place to be at, eh?