Exclusive Album Premiere: Celestial Scourge’s Observers of the Inevitable
I’d like to observe you try!
Arriving Friday, February 28th, via Time to Kill Records, Celestial Scourge’s debut LP Observers of the Inevitable is a sunburst explosion of infinite horrors. Formed in 2021 and with 2023’s Dimensions Unfurled under their Orion’s Belt, Celestial Scourge has created with Observers of the Inevitable an album that is an “uncontrolled whirlpool of brute strength,” a “carefully sculpted” anticyclonic storm that manages to condense the band’s brutal technical death metal in one chaotic yet solid package. Lay low in your Galaxie 500, hit neutral in the tail of a comet, and let Celestial Scourge take you on a “voyage across the cosmic laminar winds.”
Celestial Scourge take their influences from the foundational brutality of Suffocation, the livewire technicality of Zenith Passage, and the songwriting acumen of Cattle Decapitation. You’ll also hear similarities to fellow deep-space lunatics Atræ Bilis and even the occasional winding madness of earlier Tomb Mold riffs. Featuring members of Blood Red Throne, Deception, Ruun, Glimt, and many more, these veterans of Norwegian metal know exactly what they’re doing. From the astrophysically blinding opener “The Advent of Deities” through to the blunt-force planetary implosion of closer “Ancient Forms,” Observers of the Inevitable is a brutal tech death tour de force, a virtuosic combination of lightspeed drumming, chasmic bass, malicious guitars, and haunting growls. It is an immensely listenable, infectious album, one replete with earworm riffs, stellar moments, and heady ideas that demand incalculable listens.
To date, we’ve been treated to lead single “Vessels.” The album’s second track begins with a lightning-quick nod to the deft solos of “The Advent of Deities” before launching a groove-laced all-out brutal assault. Another star-melting solo erupts after about a minute, followed by the kind of Suffocation beatdown we’ve all come to love. There’s little time to breathe throughout. You’re adrift and flailing out of orbit with a cracked helmet. Let’s just hope you can mutate into an anaerobic existence soon enough. That’s the only way to survive until the inevitability of it all arrives.
But, oh, there’s so much more. Today, we’re thrilled to bring you an exclusive early album premiere. You’ll be treated to the dementia of “Exterminated,” wherein Eirik Waadeland begins to show off his vocals range while the band pounds out another crater-stomping breakdown of multidimensional proportions. Did that mention of Tomb Mold start tickling your fancy like a monstrous crab covered in “algal slime” and “alive with appetite”? “Wandering Waste of Oxygen” is going to have you begging for that unholy creature of futurity to consume you whole. “Insectoid Evisceration,” one of my favourite tracks on the album, contorts and transforms those Cattle Decapitation influences to create something as inconceivably alien as any of the monstrosities gracing the album’s bad space trip cover. “Assembling Deformities” begins with a recognizable space age staccato of classic technical death metal but soon turns into something more resembling its name. The breakdown that lands around the 2:50 mark is so satisfying, bolstered as it is by just a hint of melodic harmonizing. The album’s lengthiest track, “Assembling Deformities” is relentless, a true cavalcade of expertly crafted ideas and riffs. A winding, unknowable path that leads to the final bludgeoning of the aforementioned “Ancient Forms.” Praise be these ancient forms of death metal, venerable but not bygone, hoary and esteemed. These are our texts, our constellations, our lodestars. Bands like Celestial Scourge know how to arrange and rearrange them towards reverential ends.
About the new record, the band has this to say:
Observers of The Inevitable is a collection of songs that shows every element of brutal technical death metal we love as a whole. So now that it’s soon to be out we can’t wait to share it with the world and put these songs more onto the live stage. Celestial Scourge is a collective of people that strives for brutality in every note.We like to put focus on the most powerful parts from the different sub genres in death metal and create our own twisted version of it. With inspiration from the unsolved mysteries of space and all its horrid secrets that we can’t fathom as a species here on Earth. We think this album is the perfect blend of craziness and seriousness for the experienced and the new listeners.
Mysteries of space. Horrid, unfathomable secrets. Crazy. Serious. I feel myself to be H.G. Wells’ Time Traveler after he has fled the year 802,701 ever deeper into the inscrutable future. “As I stood sick and confused,” he tells us, “I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing—against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood red water, and it was hopping fitfully about.” Here, at the edge of time, at the edge of comprehension, at the edge of reality, is what is left of life. Some thing, the size of a football or perhaps bigger, trailed by tentacles, hopping about in blood red water. The point of Wells’ The Time Machine is that time, that evolution, that life are all unpredictable, that there is nothing inevitable about human progress. From the grand cosmic vantage of Celestial Scourge’s Observers of the Inevitable, existence is reduced to, revealed to be, its most incomprehensible. That is the only thing we can expect. Inexorably inexplicable. Just like life. Just like Celestial Scourge.
Observers of the Inevitable arrives
Friday, February 28th, via Time To Kill Records.
You can get it digitally, on space purple vinyl,
on CD, or on a gorgeous cassette.
Let’s just hope we get some uglysleeves at some point.
