ALBUM REVIEW: Beyond The Palest Star – Vorga
Whoever decided to ditch the corpsepaint clichés and devil-worshiping, jump the blast beats into hyperspace, and send black metal hurtling towards the distant stars deserves a round of applause, and Germany’s VORGA deserve a Nobel prize.
On their 2022 debut, Striving Towards Oblivion, VORGA chucked celestial black metal and technical death metal into a super collider and charted a course through the stars of existential dread. On its follow-up Beyond The Palest Star, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Спейса, guitarist Atlas, and drummer Hymir restructure their time and space, stripping it back to a blackened death metal blueprint that goes beyond expectation.
It’s clear from the start that this seven-stop expedition to the upper echelons of space is designed to fully immerse you, made for repeat listens. For example, if you’ve ever wished to see the birth and death of a star unfold in real-time, opener Voideath throws you into the scorching sun, setting your atmosphere alight as brain-altering dissonance collides like particles with Спейса’s banshee-sized shrieks. Those shrieks morph into the first sign of madness as you move into The Sophist, as Hymir’s spacious drums soak up the dissonance, and the vocals are drenched in a doomier delivery, mixed underneath the guitars like a far-away entity distilling its ideologies in your mind.
The immersion doesn’t stop there. Much like BEHEMOTH did in evolving the depth of their sound from Evangelion to The Satanist, Beyond The Palest Star sees VORGA dial up the cinematic theatrics. Magical Thinking’s sci-fi synths play out like a Mass Effect loading screen, as radio chatter echoes out into your eardrums like a faulty comms channel, before sickly melodies do the dance of death with dissonance to keep you on the edge of your seat, whilst closer Terminal builds suspense with supernatural synths straight out of a 70s sci-fi classic, floating somewhere in the void between drawn-out drum fills and droning dissonance, before Спейса’s growls rupture your eardrums.
Beyond The Palest Star isn’t just a symphonic waltz through a proggy black metal solar system. The Cataclysm is a palette-cleansing pill, taking you on a trip through breakneck blast beats designed to make your consciousness submit, as dissonant riffs buzz like a bee around sharp melodies and banshee shrieks scream out at lightspeed — if anything, this track truly is its namesake: a sudden, violent upheaval you want to relive over and over again. Later, Fractal Cascade’s devilishly dark growls that grind out like they’re from deep within the belly of the beast, before shifting into paranoia-inducing whispers that act as vessels for your imagination without letting up momentum.
It’s been 10 years since BEHEMOTH plotted out the shape of blackened death metal to come on The Satanist, yet in Beyond The Palest Star, VORGA present the successor we’ve been searching for. Along with the likes of IMPERIALIST and REPLICANT, this is the future of blackened death metal.
Rating: 10/10
Beyond The Palest Star is set for release on March 29th via Transcending Obscurity Records.
Like VORGA on Facebook.