Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. This week Dobbin chatted to Tom Cronin of Celestial Sanctuary to discuss the release of Insatiable Thirst for Torment. We went for a deep dive into this record in this interview as well as other topics.
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Dobbin: Insatiable Thirst for Torment just hit 100,000 streams, 5 weeks on from release, how are you feeling about it?
Tom: I don’t want to sound too gushy, but, I am going to be gushy. The response has been absolutely crazy, people have been so kind. It feels like we’ve picked up quite a few fans this time round. I’m not great at taking compliments at the best of times, but there’s been a lot of that over the past 5 weeks, I appreciate every kind word that has been uttered.
Dobbin: I wanted to do a deep dive on Insatiable Thirst for Torment. First, I wanted to highlight my impression of your signature style: a sort of slow tempo that you drop into, particularly in the verses. It’s a swaggering ‘power-stride’ kind of tempo that you can reasonably double up to go fast, which gives you a lot of natural dynamics, rather than going hard all the time. On this record you retain that, but everything is now crazier and more structurally interesting.
Tom: I agree, and I can probably attribute that to the you-know-what era. Spending a lot of time walking whilst listening to the demos, subconsciously that ‘stride’ got in. The doubling-up is very conscious, where we don’t sit in that tempo for too long. The analogy I think of between the half and double speed parts is like a chest-burster.
Dobbin: Speaking of imagery, this record has the most incredible artwork by James Bousema. In previous interviews you said you never expected to work with such a talented artist.
Tom: We’re unbelievably chuffed. I think it was the Municipal Waste artwork I saw first. It was so good, I sort of wrote it off – we thought he’d be way out of our price range. But through talking, getting to know James and his knowledge of the metal underground, we realised we had to go for it. We gave him our ideas, trying not too be too exact, but James would probably kick back and say it was super detailed. Initially he played it down, saying it might take a few weeks. But after one weekend we got four drafts of the artwork, he loved the idea and was so enthused. We knew then that we’d picked the right guy. All four drafts were insane in their own right. It was a really easy process, drama free. We’d ask for more gore, until he couldn’t add any more.
Dobbin: Quick mention that Church Road did an amazing vinyl for this for subscribers – it looks like a stream of magma coming towards you.
Dobbin: Starting with the first track, “Trapped in the Rank Membrane”: it’s so well structured, all the parts feel so ‘fated’ and natural – of course this riff comes in now, of course it needs this outro – it’s possibly the record’s strongest song. There was also a live version on the Soul Diminished Redux too.
Tom: It was the first song we wrote for the record. We’d had it in the set for a while, which is why it made it to the live session. For me this set the tone perfectly for what would follow, and it was always intended to be the first song on the record. I knew that from the demo, starting that single guitar riff. Although it’s quite long, it was very natural to write, and I didn’t try to make it lengthy. It also helps us shed some skin from the first record where lots of the songs follow the same formula, but this one, structure-wise, is for me a clear maturity from Soul Diminished.
Dobbin: “Glutted With Chunder” just got a music video. A common theme on this record is a sick bridge that isn’t overdone, just a few repeats but it’s really gripping. The lyrics are disgusting, I’m so glad that there aren’t any actual chunder samples on this one!
Tom: We’ve been playing this one for about a year now. For me, this is an 180 on the first track. It’s a ‘standard’ structure, and the mission was to write a song that was simple – we might have borrowed a bit from “Blood and Thunder” (Mastodon) here to help us write a focused song. For me, it’s a bit tech, probably still in 4/4, but for us it’s a lot!
Dobbin: Speaking of technical bits, “Swivel Eyed and Gurning in the Shadows” has the trademark swaggering tempo, but it’s got double tempo parts, a sweet bridge, and solos. On Soul Diminished you didn’t come off like a ‘soloing’ band, you weren’t having a wank on stage. But on this record you’re doing a few short solos, like crazy whammy bar bits. Do you see yourself as a soloing band?
Tom: To be honest, with Soul Diminished, it was out of necessity. Matt hadn’t joined the band, so the solo for “Suffer Your Sentience” that we play live is totally different to what’s on record. Matt calls himself a rhythm guitarist, and rhythm is my focus, so we tended to try and do creative things that aren’t solos. This time around, it’s not about wanting to be a ‘soloing’ band, it just adds another element to the sound. We’re never going to be a band that shreds, but – I’ll name-drop Eric Rutan here, not to say he isn’t a shredder, but the way he writes solos is to take you on a journey. That’s more like what we want to do. Or like David Gilmour, with Pink Floyd being a local band, it’s our nod to that as well.
Dobbin: On “Meandering Stream of Foul Fluid”, the intro and outro are short atmospheric bits. If you kept them going, you could have made a doom song. Is there any specific influence that brought those about?
Tom: It was a guitar with tons of reverb to get that effect, rather than keys. There were two inspirations. I was playing Elden Ring a lot during the writing process of this. The first area has a really satisfying big note that is really ethereal. That, coupled with Mastodon’s “Chimes at Midnight”, which is bookended with similar bits.
Dobbin: It makes the track really unique in your discography. I love the term “cavernous” in death metal, and that’s not really your scene, you have to dedicate yourself to that, but it’s your one bit.
Tom: I love that stuff like Fetid, Cerebral Rot, and Vastum. There was a lot of influence on the first album, and you could call Soul Diminished a little bit cavernous, but we consciously avoided being fully “cavernous”.
Dobbin: This record’s production sounds great, it was to an extent home recorded, right? It’s clearly worked out for you.
Tom: Yes, across the band we’ve got lots of experience running studios, which is fortunate. We’re also hands on, so we just had to pick up the last few bits of knowledge. James runs is own drum and recording studio, so he’s very experienced.
Dobbin: “Biomineralisation (Cell Death)” was the single, what drove you to pick that one? It must have been hard.
Tom: It was hard – not to sound up my own arse, but all the songs stand up on their own, have a uniqueness, and when you consume the record as a whole, you get what we’re doing ‘in full’. I think we picked “Biomineralisation (Cell Death)” as it shows a departure from what we’d done in the past, but it was similar enough that people wouldn’t hear it and say “what the fuck is this?”. It also demonstrates how my vocal style has developed since Soul Diminished.
Dobbin: I don’t think you’re a sing along band, but the next two songs feel like they have ‘crowd participation’ bits. In “The Lurid Glow of a Dead, Buring Body” there’s the “dun-dun, dun-dun” bit for fist pumping, and you also drop the band name at the end of the song. Was this one written with live performance in mind?
Tom: It wasn’t really written specifically for a live setting. On the name-drop, you know, we took our name from a Bolt Thrower song. We like them, probably not their biggest fans, but at this point we sound nothing like them. So our intention was to reclaim it a bit here. Of course, no shade on Bolt Thrower, but we’re our own thing at this point. Plus we don’t want any legal action…
Dobbin: Another karaokeable bit is “Unquenchable Thirst…”, I almost see the karaoke ball bouncing on the words for lines like “coagulation necrosis…”, although I’m guessing you’re not expecting a sing along.
Tom: I’m driven by what’s catchy and cool to me, if anybody in the crowd wants to sing along, that’s cool of course. It’s never the intention of course, but we mostly want people to kill each other to our songs.
Dobbin: I hear they do!
Tom: It gets pretty mad sometimes! I’ve seen a guy get uppercutted in the pit. We started off very seriously, and we take our playing really seriously, but we want people to, not laugh, but have fun.
Dobbin: Another cool thing about “Unquenchable Thirst…” is that it’s a slow song, but with fast turns, and is structurally complex. And it’s great that it’s followed by the final song “Gutted with a Blunt Blade”, which is your fastest song. It’s got my favourite of your riffs in the bridge, which comes round in a slightly different way each time. It’s a kind of technical bit from, as you say, a non-technical band. I’d love to see that one on a setlist.
Tom: It’s not quite the same from studio to live. James, our drummer, has a tendency to speed things up, he gets us playing them at higher speeds. “Gutted with a Blunt Blade” is certainly our fastest song, and I just know James is going to play it faster! There were actually physical injuries just from recording this one. Matt pulled a muscle in his arm, or foot, or something. I threw out one of my intercostal muscles whilst I was recording vocals, near the end of the song. One of the last phrases, it felt like someone had shoved a knife between my ribs. I thought I was having a heart attack, I fell to the floor!
Dobbin: Is that where the name came from? Did you use that take on the song?
Tom: I didn’t even think of that. Unfortunately the take didn’t sound brutal enough. Maybe a black metal band would have used it…
Dobbin: Among your upcoming live events, you’re doing Damnation and Reality Unfolds in January. Another really cool band there is Fuming Mouth. Are there any upcoming shows you want to mention?
Tom: Reality Unfolds is the first day of a full UK run we’re doing with Fuming Mouth. We’re even going to Norridge, Wales, the south. Similar to what we did with Undeath, hitting as many corners of the UK that we can. I’ve been following Fuming Mouth since they had an old logo and had 2 or 3 members, so it’s really cool to see where their trajectory is going.
Dobbin: That’s amazing! To finish, do you have anything you’d like to plug?
Tom: Mutagenic Host (on Dry Cough records). They’re doing really good things, great guys, if you like dumb death metal, go check them out. Coffin Mulch, Brain Bath, Penny Coffin, Ageless Summoning – all really great Scottish death metal. Scotland is the new Florida.
Check out the full podcast for even more discussion about old school and new school death metal, listening habits for enjoying death metal, live walk-on songs, and an overview of this year’s Damnation fest. Order their new record here and grab tickets for the run with Fuming Mouth here.