SONG: Sleeping Cathedrals

SONG: “Sleeping Cathedrals”. (OGG version here.)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “World’s biggest whale graveyard found in Indian Ocean off Australia”, ABC News (Australia), 10 June 2026, as used in the post “Whale graveyard reveals unknown prehistoric species”.

ABSTRACT:
This was a strange one.
I had it virtually done as last month’s deadline rolled around. Drums were first, then a chord progression, an idea for how the words would work, but … the more “good” things I did to it — getting a good bass line recorded cleanly, re-doing vocals, experimenting with vocal harmonizer effects in a very intentional way — the less I liked it. The chord progression was basically the same as “Creep” (I can’t remember the name of the cadence, but I remember it having one; Radiohead just puts it on an an endless loop), but it kept sounding chipper and not right for a song about the eerie majesty of an undersea graveyard for creatures with immense bodies as big as… well, OK, “cathedrals” is probably overstating it, but big enough to go inside, at any rate. The synthetic vocal harmonies just weren’t harmonic enough. The lead vox were too warbly to be proper leads, but too proper to really shoegaze into reverb blankets like an undersea song should be. Dynamics weren’t being very dynamic either.

And then for whatever reason I started listening to some old Camper Van Beethoven, one of my favorite bands from my misspent youth. And on their self-titled third album (or maybe fourth, depending on how you want to count), they did a couple of songs that were just other, earlier songs played backwards. And then I heard a couple other things online — not looking for this sort of thing, just looking and listening around — that were doing the same sort of thing in different genres and with different moods, and yeah, OK, message received. The world wants psychedelia with its prehistoric whale graveyard. Got it, chief.

Sliced up the musical backing into verse/chorus/outro sections, reversed each chunk individually, did a little more mixing, cross-fading, bringing up the right-way-around organ track, playing with some backwards vocals, and yeah, This feels like entering an alien world and finding massive remains of ancient creatures collected there, fossilizing in the dark and the pressure.

Part of what held this up is that I’ve been, for more than two months, trying to learn a penitential cover in a mode that does not come naturally to me. There are changing time signatures. Musicianship. But I’m still at it.

LYRICS:

The sun never shines
The sea is our vault
How heavy our sky
How precious our salt

How flesh leaves the bones
How gardens take bloom
How mountains descend
How crowded the tombs

In cathedrals
Of collapsing carrion…
Collapsing carrion

Where giants break down
We take this and eat
The valleys resound
Giving thanks for the meat

Future fossils of whales
Fall like brittle stars
Like the bones grow stones
Reading 500 bars

In cathedrals
Of collapsing carrion…
Collapsing carrion

In cathedrals
Of collapsing carrion…
Collapsing carrion

In the Dordrecht Deep
Where the methane seeps
At their final sleep
So many sleeping cathedrals
So many sleeping cathedrals
So many sleeping cathedrals