After plastering their blood-stained announcement onto the UK’s extreme metal scene with their 2021 debut full-length ‘Soul Diminished’, 2023 saw the release of Celestial Sanctuary’s sophomore record ‘Insatiable Thirst For Torment’. Their second full-album outing saw the quartet rise as a key player amongst some notable others in a new wave of British Extreme Metal. The monolithic and bestial album artwork hinted at something larger, more ambitious and more fully realised than their already thrilling debut.
Opening to the grindy guitar proclamations on opener ‘Trapped Within The Rank Membrane’, it is clear that the band were aiming for something more violently regal. The track, from a production standpoint, offered more breathing room than previous material, with more overall audible clarity. Vocalist Thomas Cronin’s reverb-washed and pained vocals leaping out of the mix to bark his desperate orders into your ear canal like some sort of hungry diseased Rottweiler. A track such as ‘Swivel Eyed And Gurning In The Shadows’ embodies a muscular palm-mute routine that trades off with some rather catchy moments of slower explosive combustion. The drums in the latter portion of the track display an impressive rhythmic variety and add considerable spatial scale to the track, among many others on the album.
Later on, track six ‘The Lurid Glow Of A Dead Burning Body’ opens to a dizzying full-band motif before indulging in some of the most furious-sounding moments of the entire album. The track feels akin to a demonicly yelled beckon; a call towards an immeasurably painful burning horror at the vent of an active volcano. The album closes with ‘Gutted With A Blunt Blade’, which is another one of the record’s most seething entries. The track is fast and audibly pummelling, taking you through its many riff ideas and a melodic guitar solo before the band converges on the record’s final moments of concert pit anthemics.
Record number two shows Celestial Sanctuary reaching for a deeper and more cavernous circle of hell. It’s a straightforward Death Metal album that will appeal to traditional purists of the genre, with nods to genre greats such as Cannibal Corpse, Autopsy, and the grindy distorted musical ether of Dismember.
