Review by Sandre the Giant
German black metallers Vorga are back with another entry in their cosmic journey of darkness, ‘Beyond the Palest Star’, out now through Transcending Obscurity. We reviewed their debut ‘Radiant Gloom’ back in 2019 here, and it has been very enjoyable watching their sound build and mature through their debut full length ‘Striving Towards Oblivion’ two years ago. Will the cold beauty of space inspire quality once more?
Opener ‘Voideath’ is a grimly epic work, spacious songwriting allowing the more traditional blasting and tremolo riffing to soar and yet maintain their severity. Vorga’s work has an uncanny catchiness about it, not that there are big hooks or singalong choruses but in a most insidious way. Tracks like the swelling ‘Magical Thinking’ linger in your consciousness for a long time, and I think that’s why ‘Beyond the Palest Star’ is appealing to me so much at the moment. The songwriting is superb, multilayered and always moving in interesting directions. There’s so much melody throughout, threading its way through a genuinely savage record and keeping it memorable. The blackened gallop of ‘The Cataclysm’ is gorgeous, and as the album progresses the scope just broadens out until you can’t see the edges anymore. Vorga have really grasped a true sense of limitless space in their sound. As a guitar tone akin to keyboard effects plays across the sweeping closer ‘Terminal’, it adds just the perfect amount of extra ‘otherness’ to the melodies that your galaxial feel is complete.
When you have a beautifully sci-fi album cover and deal with science fiction themes in your black metal, there’s always going to be loads of ‘epic’ or ‘cosmic’ cliches thrown around about your work. But Vorga has transcended past mere laziness into a galaxy of pure, black radiance. ‘Beyond the Palest Star’ is a journey, an album that sounds genuinely huge and yet never loses its edge or its fury. Its blackened claws are reaching out into the universer, grasping for light in the endless black and finding glories beyond our reckoning. A triumphant return for one of modern black metal’s most memorable acts.
https://www.facebook.com/VorgaBand/
https://transcendingobscurity.bandcamp.com/
The Killchain 