The Answer Is In The Beat

Celestaphone & Dealers of God: Cult Subterranea (Dismiss Yourself, 2025)

May 5, 2025 at 8:24 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Celestaphone’s previous album, Paper Cut From the Obit, was such a complex, reality-questioning work that I’m still processing it two years later — all I can say for sure is that it’s bonkers and fun as hell. Cult Subterranea is shorter and has less songs on it, so it doesn’t feel quite as sprawling, but it still feels like it’s being beamed down from another plane of awareness. It’s less jazz-funk and avant-prog than the previous album and a bit closer to post-punk, though ultimately it’s a singular form of galaxy brain art-rap. It’s also self-described as “antigospel”, which is most immediately evident with songs like “Drake Passage” (opening line: “‘Christian progressive’, that’s just an oxymoron”). The album is dedicated to Harry Horse, the creator of an obscure ’90s PC game called Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages, which proposed that human history was a lie and aliens aided humanity’s development and evolution. I assume that some of the album’s lyrics relate these themes to the current state of the world. There’s also a lot of bars which eloquently describe how moronic and useless most rappers are. The Bandcamp description states “This is entertainment NOT an affidavit”, so maybe it’s best to not to overthink this and just enjoy the ride, but it would be a disservice to say that it’s not that deep, because it clearly is. Anyway, the song with Blu and Quelle Chris sounds a bit more down-to-earth, even if it’s about a UFO abduction, and “Chaenodraco” is a dystopian fanfare at the cyberpunk Outback Steakhouse.