Band:	Siderean
Album:	Spilling The Astral Chalice
Style:	Progressive death metal
Release date:	September 13, 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. The Sacred Sea
02. Visions
03. Forces
04. Emerald Age
05. The Coming Tides
06. To Build Ruins

Slovenia once again sends death metal to space.

Now that we've had more than one release under the "Siderean" name, their original run as Teleport becomes more trivia than anything too relevant to the current album. It is relevant mostly towards yours' truly, as The Expansion was an album that I covered in our Clandestine Cuts series, and that was my first contact with the group. Their space affinity was established all the way back on Galactic Usurper, more than a decade ago, though their trashier origins are long past. Their penchant for technicality that goes hand in hand with the cosmic fascination is the thread that runs throughout their whole evolution, the band morphing into something more death metal based even before the name change. But now, as Siderean, you wouldn't expect the band to keep morphing.

I don't think one can find any traces of thrash metal on Spilling The Astral Chalice the same way that I spotted them on Lost On Void's Horizon, though even for those it might be just more me looking too much into that shared technical thrash/technical death DNA because I was aware of the band's origin, and someone new to the band might not have picked up on any such traces. So that's even more the case this time around, when thrash metal isn't even the one other metal genre that acts as an undertone, being replaced in spades by a pretty potent black metal touch. Blackened leanings have been part of Teleport's sound as well, but even if Spilling The Astral Chalice might not lean into them enough to call it blackened death, it's quite noticeable.

There are mostly two ways in which the blackened touch becomes apparent. The first is that the vocal performance of Jan Brišar does mostly stick in the gnarly growl territories that one expects from technical space-themed death metal, but also deviates from it with some shrieks that do have a stronger despair filled blackened edge to them. The second is that the dissonance and atonality that often reminds of Gorguts/Obscura can have a bit of a Deathspell Omega touch too. There are plenty of smoother atmospheric focused bits that work to make that atonal dissonance feel compelling, and to spice up the progressive death metal sound.

A lot of what I mentioned is ornamentation around that sound, and it does make Spilling The Astral Chalice a more interesting listen, but for the most part it is a progressive death metal album, and it works so well because of how well they do the progressive death metal sound.