ALBUM REVIEW: Striving Toward Oblivion – Vorga
We’ve been obsessed with the stars since time immortal. Our solar system is an endless cosmos to be explored. Our universe is so vast, yet we’ve seen so little of it. If oblivion is the state of being unaware of what is happening around us, then we are certainly striving towards it as the Earth orbits the sun. On their debut album Striving Toward Oblivion, Germany’s VORGA build a super-collider of sounds that merges celestial black metal and technical death metal with the existential dread the great beyond conjures. It’s ambitious beyond belief, but benefits from its makers’ boldness.
Opener Starless Sky does away with scene-setting in favour of throwing you straight in at the deep end. Imagine if BEHEMOTH’s Nergal shot off to space in a rocket ship to find alien lifeforms with DISSECTION and NECROPHOBIC – Striving Toward Oblivion is its soundtrack. If the album proves anything, it’s that VORGA do not compose songs, they construct worlds. Across eight tracks, its 45-minute runtime is unrelenting – there’s not a single track under five minutes – yet if you last the voyage, you’re duly rewarded with a brave new world for blackened death metal.
It’s not that VORGA offer anything entirely unheard of. Technical death metal has flirted with sci-fi for years, yet where RINGS OF SATURN or BLOOD INCANTATION sounds archaic, VORGA sound catastrophically monolithic. Take Disgust for example, where blast beats collide with near-orchestral riffs like asteroids to earth, as vocalist Спейса delivers a death growl worthy of a deity.
Bands like BEHEMOTH have spent years terraforming their primal instincts into majestic works of art, yet VORGA skip this stage with ease. They leave Sventevith and Grom at the starting gate and skip straight to the grandiosity of The Satanist and I Loved You At Your Darkest. The comparisons come most notably on the dizzyingly atmospheric, orchestrally-constructed cosmic rage of closer Death Manifesting, which wouldn’t go amiss on those latter albums. It’s at once beautifully celestial as it is brutally catastrophic.
Striving Toward Oblivion is arguably a baptism by fire. Its pace will pound you round for round like a heavyweight boxer. It never lets up, and whilst you’d argue a little breathing room is required, there’s not a single second you find yourself bored. It’s not repetitive, and it’s certainly not short on ideas. Taken is a near seven-minute ride through the cosmos, where its rhythm sections suck you in like a blackhole as its grandiose guitarwork grips you like its your life force, and that’s not forgetting the other seven tracks you experience. Quite how this trio – completed by guitarist Atlas and drummer Jervas – manage to conjure a sound so complex between them is astonishing yet admirable.
With Striving Toward Oblivion, VORGA deliver a deadly message of intent. If this is their debut album, the stars above only know what they can come up with next. This is undeniably blackened death metal’s finest debut in a decade, there’s no doubt about that.
Rating: 10/10
Striving Toward Oblivion is set for release on February 4th via Transcending Obscurity Records.
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