death metal

Record #1012: Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere (2024)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

When a band releases a seminal, genre defining record, the follow up can be a bit tricky. After the third-eye opening death metal opus of Hidden History of the Human Race, I wasn’t sure where else Blood Incantation could go. That record perfectly mixed their death metal brutality and proggy sonic exploration in a way that neither undermined the other.

Well…at least it seemed perfect until Absolute Elsewhere. While their brand of punishing death metal is still at the beating heart of this record, it strays further from that center than ever before. I’m not sure anyone could do a better job of explaining it than vocalist/guitarist Paul Reidl, who said it sounds “like the soundtrack to a Herzog-style sci-fi epic about the history of/battle for human consciousness itself, via a ’70s prog album played by a ’90s death metal band from the future.”

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Record #937: Conjurer – Pathós (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

If there’s one thing the metal community loves, it’s hyperbole. There are thousands of metal records that come out a year, and they are all described with superlatives.

For instance, let’s look at Conjurer, who the internet has decided to call “The Saviors of British Metal.” No matter how hard you roll your eyes at that, Conjurer is rolling theirs harder. They’ve said a few times that they don’t consider themselves to be doing anything all that revolutionary.

Still, listening to Pathós, you might think that the internet hyperbolists are on to something.

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Record #891: Dream Unending – Song of Salvation (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It’s often said that music is a transcendent art—that it exceeds the sum of its parts, reaching beyond the mundane circumstances of our day to day. But if we’re being honest, an awful lot of music falls short of that promise. If I’m skimming the radio, there’s very little that might inspire even a shift in my mood, let alone an altered state of consciousness.

But every once in a while I’ll find a record that reminds me just how much power music has. A record that stretches my imagination beyond its usual limits and peels back the corners of the fabric of reality, even for just a moment. And if are once again being honest, a lot of musicians think this is what they’re doing, only to mire themselves in woo-woo pastiche and tired cliches.

In the case of Dream Unending’s sophomore record Song of Salvation though, those traps are avoided, in favor of long-form progressive death-doom metal that transcends not only its genre but its ambitions.

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Record #859: Blood Incantation – Starspawn (2016)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

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.

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Record #778: Blood Incantation – Hidden History of the Human Race (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

As much as I love metal, I don’t usually mess around with technical death metal. By and large, I’m not totally interested in musical pissing contests to see how fast and brutal a band can play.

But I’ve faced a new mystery lately. I’ve had trouble sleeping on and off my whole life, and while it’s not a new thing for me to wake up in the middle of the night, it is a new thing for me to wake up to vinyl purchases that I don’t remember making. These purchases are usually albums that I’ve been meaning to listen to but haven’t yet. The first was Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore, and for the most part, my subconscious purchases have been on a hot streak.

So when I woke up to this order, I thought perhaps Sleepytime Nat had finally stumbled. After all, he should know I’m not into tech death, right?

But to my surprise, this album is staggering. Blood Incantation manages to avoid the pitfalls that ensnare so many of their contemporaries. They don’t abandon the conventions of the genre, but they aren’t limited by them either. They stretch into ambient, psychedelic, and prog, creating an album that feels truly transcendental.

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