Depending on who you ask, a band can often either be speaking in its own language or reveling in its own tropes. Concerning Thy Catafalque, the latter is true from my perspective. However, 2023’s Alföld changed that. That album sacrificed part of Tamás Kátai‘s eclectic formula of progressive metal, folk music and electronica for a straighter direction and was all the better for it. With a focus on death metal, Alföld managed to streamline Kátai‘s songwriting somewhat while the more floating, or exploratory, elements took a back seat. This is the first Thy Catafalque album I’ve enjoyed all the way through since jumping on board when Geometria released in 2018. As noted in my review of Alföld, which I might even have underrated, I was curious to see where Kátai would go next. The answer turns out to be one step backward and two steps forward.
With a long and spicy Hungarian title, XII: A gyönyörü álmok ezután jönnek is by all counts a folk album. It uses folk music as a basis for its rhythms in bright and airy compositions, filled with a large variety of vocals. It’s also a metal album, which is what it presents as at first with the heaviest compositions landing in the first third of the album. This is nothing new in Thy Catafalque-land but its odd character surfaces with repeat spins. I stress that this is a folk album because while distorted guitars are ever present, the metal parts are written as if they are folk music (the bouncy guitar and bass riffs in “Vasgyár” is a good example of this). Támas seems to have reached a point where he is starting to meld all of the disparate parts that make up Thy Catafalque into a more unified sound. Perhaps as a residual effect from writing Alföld, the compositions are tighter and the heavier moments land with skilled delivery. The guitars and surprisingly heavy drums keeps everything grounded, rarely letting the momentum die down save for a two-track break in the middle of the album. Towards the end, some heavy metal creeps into Thy Catafalque‘s sound and ends things on a high note with some greatly inspired clean vocals with a rougher timbre. As always, it’s ridiculous how many different styles and instruments Kátai and his bus-load of collaborators manage to pull off, all under the same tight production. But the key here is how cohesive it all sounds, unlike previous attempts like Vadak, where it all comes across as an aimless bloated mess.
As Alföld, an album that found its success in focusing in one direction, XII: A gyönyörü álmok ezután jönnek instead looks to the horizon and catalogues all it can see, to equal success. It’s an album that flows and is easy to spin again and again. In a genre of bands tripping over themselves to regurgitate old prog tropes, Thy Catafalque almost stands alone in its uniqueness. Támas Kátai‘s progressive journey is becoming one I’m inclined to follow, rather than to watch from afar.
