As I’ve stated before—about this same band—I’m not the biggest fan of technical death metal. But for whatever reason, Blood Incantation somehow manages to bypass my displeasure for the genre’s indulgences. However, my appreciation of the Denver quartet has been satisfied by 2019’s Hidden Histories of the Human Race, the group’s apparent opus, so I haven’t done much exploration of their other material.

That apparently wasn’t enough for my subconscious: whatever nighttime phenomenon caused me to buy Hidden Histories in my sleep struck again, and I was greeted a few days later to a tracking number for a copy of Starspawn that I didn’t remember ordering.

While I expected it to utterly pale in comparison of its successor, Starspawn is a worthwhile work in its own right. Had I heard this instead of Hidden Histories, there’s a good chance that my feelings toward Blood Incantation would be the same.

That said, it’s always a strange thing to work backward from an artist’s opus. It’s almost impossible to avoid comparing it to the later, more celebrated work peeling back their perfect craft to reveal rougher edges and ideas still in development. The context reflects the later work in pupal form, still enveloped in a cacoon of smaller thinking or poor execution.

The major difference between Starspawn and its successor is merely that of ambition. There’s no overwhelming booklet of conspiracy theories or mysticism. There’s no backstory of the band writing parts too difficult for them to play. There are no  instrumentals that were composed over months as the band dropped acid and improvised together. There’s no eighteen-minute epic closer.

Everything else though feels exactly the same. The abrasively technical riffs, the machine gun drum pulses, the abrupt rhythmic shifts, the wailing leads, and the occasional dalliances into psychedelia are all well represented. The hype sticker declares, “FINALLY! The ultimate cosmic death-metal release. Technical/ambient/funeral/etc.” And where hype stickers are given to exaggeration and hyperbole, this might actually understate it. Every track is monstrous and mercurial, morphing several times throughout the runtime. From the massive thirteen-minute opener “Vitrification of Blood (pt 1)” to the chaotic doom-death of the closing title track, Starspawn is every bit as brutal and devastating as its successor, even if it doesn’t set its sights quite as high.

It’s tempting to see Starspawn as a footnote in their trip up the mountain: a base camp before the summit. But I’m not sure this record isn’t a summit unto itself. Even judging it against its more-celebrated younger brother, it stands up on its own. And maybe, just maybe, it will get me into tech-death even when I’m lucid.