Beginning from the artwork and the title of the album, we get the primary idea of what we are getting into. Cosmic black metal, at least for me, is not easy to create, and the reason for that is simple. It can get stretched into ambience in favor of atmosphere and get lost in it, creating soundscapes that actually miss the point of cosmic black metal.
So, what is the point? The best way to convey the aesthetics of cosmic black metal is, for my part, analogy. Even though writing about music is like dancing for architecture, as Martin Mull puts it, the equivalent of cosmic bm is cosmic horror, either in movies or books, even in video games. The main and core concept behind cosmicism is the insignificance of humans in the universal, or cosmic, scale. It is built upon existential dread, nihilism, absurdism. It is, in other words, a subgenre of black metal that captures the human psyche in its darkest corners of existential crisis. Man is, and forever will be, subject to powers or gods, that are way beyond his perception and ability to comprehend in a way that is scaled within his cognition. It is, in the end, a vehicle of transporting his soul into the vast void of uncreation, where all that is created has been in a state of eternal consumption by the great unknown, the beasts that are behind the blackness of space, where time ceases to have meaning.
That is what Darkspace, Sphere and now, Vorga can capture with their music. Each of them, while having commonalities, attributed mainly to Darkspace, take their own galactic road and invite us to join them on a journey of awe, terror and grandiosity.
Striving Toward Oblivion manages to build upon black metal riffs, the well-known ‘railway riffs’ of tremolo picking, and a voice that is a little lower than the music in the mix, the sense of awe and swirling chaos that can entertain and, at the same time, fulfill the black metaller’s need to escape reality into a fantasy world.
What separates black metal, and to be honest all of heavy metal, from the rest of music, is its understanding of the need of the human psyche to imagine a world beyond the mundane and cruel reality. A world where beasts, gods, or lesser gods, dimensions and realms of possibilities exist simultaneously with ours, giving us a way to express ourselves and unload the negativity and toxicity through art that may be incomprehensible to most other people, but oh, so familiar and warm to us.
Have you ever noticed that metal can be extreme in a way that relaxes the senses? This is what Vorga achieve with their debut. They take us on a journey to the vast unknown, with swirling riffs and black metal melodies, a voice that is most likely a narration of the last minutes of humanity while on a journey to find a new world to exploit and destroy. Oblivion waits at the end of our journey, whether this happens in a few hundred years or millions of years. One day we shall be the stories of a future species with cognitive abilities greater than ours, where we will have a place in history similar to what dinosaurs have in ours. Until that time comes though, let us enjoy our striving toward oblivion.
Striving Toward Oblivion is released via Transcending Obscurity Records.
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