Album review: Celestial Sanctuary – Insatiable Thirst For Torment

Trapped Within The Rank Membrane! Glutted With Chunder! Swivel Eyed And Gurning In The Shadows! Do these succinct nightmare scenarios cause you to curl your lips into an ever-so-demented grin? Then you’re the exactly kind of sicko for whom the brilliantly abhorrent second album from East Anglian death-metallers Celestial Sanctuary was made. Or you’re a serial killer. Maybe both. Whatever your putrid perversion, a scan of Insatiable Thirst For Torment’s gnarly tracklist will tell aficionados of old school death metal that these lads aren’t fucking around.

Then you hit ‘play’. From the UK’s own Ingested and Coffin Mulch to international heavyweights Gatecreeper, Blood Incantation and Undeath, the entrail-strewn subgenre is having a hell of a moment right now, but there’s a screws-loose savagery and willingness to wade into the most rotten sounds here that stands apart. Dipping below the fetid low of Meandering Stream Of Foul Fluid or basking in The Lurid Glow Of A Dead, Burning Body, it’s music to shut down higher thinking and stoke the primal savagery of the lizard brain. A truly visceral experience.

That’s not to say it’s entirely primitive, mind. With the machinelike percussion and extraterrestrial intricacy of some of the guitar work, not to mention some of the murky themes at play in songs like Biomineralization (Cell Death) and Insatiable Thirst…, there is self-evident method in the murderous madness. It’s just that by the time ITFT catapults you into the pulverising churn of remorseless closer Gutted With A Blunt Blade, you’ll be far too banged-out to care. Brutal.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Gatecreeper, Obituary, Bolt Thrower

Insatiable Thirst For Torment is out August 25 via Church Road