Hmm, isn’t that ironic? Just before attacking Vorga‘s last piece Striving Toward Oblivion, Corpus Diavolis’ 2022 piece hit. So, lo and behold, Beyond The Palest Star is on the menu, and what? The French black metallers just released their newest salacious opus. Go figure, the universe sometimes speaks to us, doesn’t it?
The brutal transition from the writhing altar to space force is harsh, though. The RMR crew’s still fending off all them daemons whilst – suddenly – there’s urgency to dust off our old spacesuits. And already this thing wants to take off and lead us to Beyond The Palest Star. And that may well be a place that even the James Webb Space Telescope couldn’t reach yet. So, hold on to something! Rough ride ahead.
Generic. That’s what comes to mind once Voideath takes off. A well-paced, moderatly melodic, but – at the same time – pretty much run-of-the-mill pleasantly speedy Atmospheric Black Metal track. One that makes you want to suit up, power your warp engine, and take off to unknown areas many parsecs away. And that generated some anxiety over here that Vorga was going to stay with that easy routine. But fear naught, things will take on steam once The Sophist arrives. This is when the band starts to pack some more meat onto the proverbial bone.
But first and foremost, Beyond The Palest Star is a dense affair. The record seems to be constructed around speed and flow. A restless contraption of never-ending riffs, ever-repeating melodies, grim blast beats, and Петър Йорданов‘s1 merciless vile rasps and growls. And while the above seems to be a harbinger of bad news going forward, this is actually not so. The space theme, the pretty advanced songwriting, the fresher delivery, and the outstanding arrangement pretty much save this record’s bacon. Even if the seriously overloaded wall of sound boring down on you at all times gets somewhat in the way. Vorga – yet again – sent us a pretty snazzy piece of crisp Black Metal full of red-hot atmospherics and an inkling of that vast empty space screaming for exploration (Magical Thinking, for instance).
And what are the highlights? The Sophist impressed us with its multi-layered grit and innovative song structure. It truly sounds like that rocky landing on foreign planets the video below so avidly describes. The slower pace, subdued groove, and in-yer-face brutality of Tragic Humanity made us return to this particular well a few times too often. That’s one track where melodics and scratchy, rough viciousness reminiscent of Anaal Nathrakh dominate over warp speed at all costs. Whereas, the spacey Terminal probably contains the meatiest of all elements on this already pretty loaded record.
And yet. If anything, Striving Toward Oblivion erred on the steamier side with more power and oomph in the delivery. Whereas Beyond the Palest Star seems to be more tailor-made for a larger audience. A production that’s hellbent on rushing to its destination whilst rapidly piling on element upon element. And that will undoubtedly irk some of the die-hard metalheads to the boiling point. In other words, the band may have traded a more measured and quality-driven approach with an often unseemly brisk style thrown breathlessly into the fray. The outcome is not necessarily bad and the result will – as always – be in the eyes of the beholder, good or bad.
Ultimately, and the aforementioned critique notwithstanding, Beyond the Palest Star still continued to dazzle us. This is what Space Metal ought to sound like. You get a sense of that vast emptiness of the unknown starting just outside our planet’s sphere of influence. Savvy songwriting, an astounding flow, smartly executed, and tightly paced blocks of subthemes, it’s all there. And it all rolls in on a wave of gritty riffs drunk on brutal tremolos, rough-hewn solos, and delicate sampling that appears here and there. The croaks, snarls, and evil rasps just perfectly fit into that vast soundscape.
And whilst Vorga might have lost some of the delicate feistiness of its debut album, Beyond the Palest Star roared out of our mighty music machine for longer than it should have. And that, by any definition, is a sure sign of the RMR crew’s endorsement.
Recommended.
Record Rating: 7/10 | Label: Transcending Obscurity | Web: Official Band Site
Release Date: 29 March 2023
- Petar Yordanov.-↩