Bandcamp An album called Let the Posers Fall! with an exclamation mark is not asking to be met halfway. Cardinals Folly have been doing this from Finland for long enough to have earned the title, this is their seventh record, and it arrives on Cruz Del Sur with a new guitarist and a stated turn further into traditional riff-led doom.
The making of it matters here. According to the sleeve it was laid on tape at Soundwell Studios across three days in December, 19th to the 21st. Forty-four minutes of music in three days, if the sleeve is right, is either confidence or stubbornness, and on this evidence it is both.
Eight songs that hold their ground
The thing you notice measuring this record is how still it is. Across the eight proper songs the distance between quiet and loud passages runs between 3.7 and 8.0 decibels, their tonal centres sit inside a 370 hertz band, and the treble share barely moves. There is no build, no collapse, no long quiet section waiting to be interrupted.
For traditional doom that is close to the specification rather than a failing. This is music that works by staying, and a record that kept dropping away to nothing would be undercutting its own posture. “Providence” closes the record and moves the most of the eight, “Hitch-Hike” the least, and both are doing the job the style asks for.
Jani Snellman recorded and mixed it and also plays the organ on “Luchador” and “Cultist Highway”, which is the kind of overlap small studios produce and which usually shows up as a record that sounds like one room rather than four. The backing choir on “Cultist Highway” is the band themselves. Roland Rodas mastered it at Cavern of Echoes and nothing has been pushed flat, peaks stay a healthy distance above the average throughout.
Then track nine happens
“Chiusura Invernale” runs sixty-seven seconds and belongs to a different album. Its tonal centre sits at 863 hertz where every song here sits above 2295. Forty percent of its energy is below two hundred and fifty hertz, against roughly a fifth everywhere else, and two and a half percent is above five kilohertz, against around twenty. It also opens 22.5 decibels between its quietest and loudest moment, which is more than any two of the songs combined.
It is placed ninth of ten, immediately before the closer. That is the most interesting decision on the record: a band this committed to consistency building one deliberate hole in it, and putting the hole almost at the end rather than in the middle where it would function as a breather.
So
So: yes if traditional doom is already something you reach for, and no if you were hoping this would be the one that converts you. The playing is solid, the production is honest, and the band sound entirely certain of what they are. The reservation is in the first section above and it is not a small one: across eight songs the record holds one level and one colour so closely that by the second half you can predict the shape of a track from its opening bar. “Chiusura Invernale” shows they can do something else when they decide to, and a minute of it is not enough. Start with “Providence” and then skip back to track nine.
The record is two things stapled together. Across the eight songs the dynamic range runs between 3.7 and 8.0 decibels with a median of 4.4, tonal centres sit between 2295 and 2662 hertz, the low band under two hundred and fifty hertz holds between 19.4 and 21.7 percent, and the treble share between 17.1 and 21.2 percent. That is a very tight cluster. “Chiusura Invernale” at track nine measures nothing like it: 863 hertz tonal centre, 40.2 percent of its energy in the bottom band, 2.5 percent above five kilohertz, and a dynamic range of 22.5 decibels across sixty-seven seconds. The closer “Providence” is the widest of the actual songs at 8.0, “I am the Zodiac” next at 7.6, and “Hitch-Hike” the narrowest at 3.7. Peaks run between 12.2 and 14.1 decibels above average across the record, so the flatness is in the writing and the arrangement rather than in the mastering.
Standout tracks: Providence, Chiusura Invernale, I am the Zodiac
