Review Summary: The rugged, uncertain yet engaging genesis of a unique musical outlet.
Nowadays Hungarian-born musician and poet Tamás Kátai enjoys a much welcomed and deserved spotlight in the extreme metal community for representing one of the most interesting and original sounding metal projects out there. Over the years his one-man band (of course along with some frequent collaborators) Thy Catafalque has developed a rich, multi-layered musical aesthetic by combining heavy and thick black-metal infused guitar riffs with booming orchestration, chilling ambiance and other influences that ranges from Hungarian folk, to industrial music to the avant-garde. Step by step he grew his reputation in the Hungarian metal underground to the point where he could step into international territories.
Kátai’s sound is recognizable but never predictable, as the constantly changing, experimental nature drives Catafalque to new and exciting directions on every new release. By the third album "Tűnő Idő Tárlat” it reached its full musical potential and remained amazingly consistent to this day with a constant flourish of creative songwriting, new concepts and approaches. The barrage of the wailing guitar noise, keyboards and other intimated instruments are sometimes freighting, other times spine-chilling. Ugliness and beauty meet in the lengthy and unorthodox compositions. The methods might change but as we can examine from the first album "Sublunary Tragedies" the darkness and bleakness are what drives the core.
The duality in the album’s musical approach can be easily summed up in the way how the opening track “Erdgeist” builds up. For the first minute-and-half we get a continuous, harrowing piano chords, then electric keyboards and other atmospheric instruments enter the picture. And all of a sudden our ears get attacked with black-metal guitar riffing with high-tempo tremolo picking, breakneck blast drumming and piercing, shrieking vocals. A major part of Sublunary Tragedies very much roots in the delivery of bands like 1349, Emperor and other classic black metal bands, with a major difference being the clash between the raw and brutal guitar sections and the cold, yet epic orchestration and sudden changes of tempo, sound and feel.
A great example of this is “Ashesdance” which can be divided into two major parts. For the first half we get a ruthless headbanger with heavy touches of industrial metal, then at the halfway point the guitars become clean and the rhythm changes, and song becomes like a Hungarian folk song, only provided with electric instruments. The whole album has an effective chilling and dark mood, with the moody piano layers, the booming echos, the buzzsaw guitars giving the feel of a lonely nighttime walk in a forest.
However despite its certainly unique and progressive approach, the songwriting often feels scattershot and unfocused (especially if we compare this to Kátai’s latter year albums), with every song trying to compress multiple ideas at once, but rarely settling for one. The end result is that some song sections are effective, but other feel overlong like the seemingly endless second half of “Via Millennia”. The black metal parts are fell into this category too with them being either spice-chilling or just clichéd in their delivery. The sound is also strange: I can’t put my finger on what is that puts off about it. Either the lo-fi guitar and drum sound, or the sometimes cheesy efforts of making everything grandiose which comes at the expanse of the atmosphere. This is why the more restraint “Rota Mundi” remains another memorable song, because it’s a song where the transitions between the clean and distorted sections are well balanced and thought out.
Sublunary Tragedies contains the shards of the many elements that Thy Catafalque perfected later: The crushing guitars, the etheric orchestras, the blending of musical genres, metal, folk and ambient into something wholly new and creating an aura of visceral darkness that all-result in a musical experience that is hard to describe by words. Every band and artist has a place to start, and this is certainly not a bad one.
