Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere
★★★★
Released October 4th, 2024 on Century Media Records
Blood Incantation are one of those bands that come along every once in a while and remake the face of death metal. That’s a very heavy thing to put on them, but presumably they’re used to it by now.
The band has received this kind of buzz before, after all. Before the pandemic, Blood Incantation were making waves with their 2019 album Hidden History Of The Human Race, a science fiction-obsessed record that showed off their penchant for combining brutal death metal riffs with cerebral Seventies prog-inspired passages. Let’s be honest. Most death metal records trudge through the same rut. It’s goofy Satanic imagery and/or gore-obsessed hijinks, set to the same damn riffs you’ve heard on every album since Scream Bloody Gore. People who listen solely to metal can probably tell the difference, but at first glance, for the average listener, there’s little to distinguish one from the other.
No one has ever had that problem with Blood Incantation. Right from the start, the band’s outside influences shine through brightly. There are UFO-style guitar heroics early on. None of that shred-blur wankery here, thank you very much. These solos have both substance and style. The prog passages are elegant – snatches of Tangerine Dream – without overpowering the rest of the music. Here’s the deal with prog metal: Dream Theater sucks. You know it, I know it. I would never use the dreaded term ‘prog metal’ to describe Blood Incantation. Instead, I’ll borrow a page from the communists. Absolute Elsewhere is death metal with prog characteristics. It takes everything that’s good about prog – the moody soundscaping, the judicious use of wild dynamics – and marries it to the best in death metal riffing.
I said above that Blood Incantation were one of those bands that would come along to change the face of death metal. To be fair, they (alongside others like Tomb Mold) already have. That’s not to say that there won’t be hundreds of bands each year churning out the same old riffs, themes, and album covers. It’s just that they’ll have less of an excuse. Clearly there are bands that know how to rip up the playbook and chart a course for the unknown. If Absolute Elsewhere causes a few others to stop and think about what they’re putting out into the world, then I think we can name it an absolute success.
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