Carpenter’s First Heavy Metal Album
I’m a huge metal fan and a huge comic book fan, so John Carpenter making a genuinely heavy record with a companion graphic novel is aimed directly at me. I covered Cathedral back in May when he announced it. Friday it actually lands, and the new single says he wasn’t kidding.
Cathedral drops August 7 on Sacred Bones. Carpenter made it with his son Cody and guitarist Daniel Davies, the same trio behind the Lost Themes records, except this time the guitars lead. Carpenter has called it “kind of our first heavy metal album.” The graphic novel hit shelves Tuesday via Storm King Comics, co-written with Sandy King. The latest single is “Revenge,” scoring the story’s climactic fight.
If you like synthwave bleeding into metal, Perturbator, Carpenter Brut, the latter of whom literally took his name from this guy, you’re going to like this. That loop closing is the part I keep thinking about. Carpenter’s scores taught a generation of producers what dread sounds like, those producers built a genre, and now the source is picking up a guitar and playing in the room they built.
And it isn’t a cash grab. The album and the book are one project, each track mapped to a chapter, the story built around an abandoned church in downtown Los Angeles that turns into a waking nightmare. That’s a real idea, executed. Legends attaching their name to things is common. Legends actually building something is not.
LA gets the better end of this. Carpenter is at Midsummer Scream at the Long Beach Convention Center this weekend, one of the biggest horror conventions in the world. Listening party Friday night the 7th, signing at the Storm King booth Saturday the 8th. If you can still get a ticket, that’s the man, the myth, the legend, and a chance to get the record or the book signed.
Get it: Cathedral is out Friday, August 7 on Sacred Bones, with vinyl variants including a deluxe splatter edition, and digital preorder is up on Bandcamp. The graphic novel is out now via Storm King Comics.
Check out the album. Check out the comic. Both.
Source: Sacred Bones Records
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John Carpenter Announces Metal Album & Graphic Novel ‘Cathedral’