The band's highly anticipated death metal foray into the stars is absolutely masterful.
Words by Rohan (@manvsplaylist):
The new Blood Incantation album, Absolute Elsewhere, delivers a horizon expanding voyage through the depths of extreme music, seamlessly merging diverse constellations of influences, styles and moods to create one of the boldest and most accomplished records in modern death metal. This is a band at the current peak of their creative evolution, pushing genre boundaries with relentless confidence and incredible outcomes.
Any new Blood Incantation transmission has now become a significant event on the extreme music release calendar. Five years following their then highly anticipated Hidden History Of The Human Race (2019) album, and two years after their ambient exploration, Timewave Zero (2022), the band headed to Berlin’s famed Hansa Studios, and seemingly managed to absorb into their sound many of the prog and krautrock influences from those very rooms. Yet, this album is far more than just simply a rigid tapestry of divergent styles, rather the band have created in the two passages that make up the record (The Stargate on side A, The Message on side B) a wickedly cohesive merging of sounds and genre-bending motifs. Without question, both of these passages take on an incrementally broader progressive leaning that anything they have done in the past, while at the same time adapting their more ambient styles to weave those elements perfectly into the true core of the band, no longer purely just lurking on the periphery.
The album takes less than two minutes to take its first sharp deviation into a portal filled with trippy atmospheres, mellow synths (provided by scene luminary Thorsten Quaeschning of Tangerine Dream), jangly guitar chords and simmering hi-hat rhythms. The mellow portal shifts further into new territory, careening into what can only be described as pure unabashed David Gilmour worship – in both tone and traditional pentatonic soloing – striking on a musical personality that Blood Incantation have never dallied in before. This only lasts for a mere minute before the journey is thrust back into hyperdrive, and we’re returned to pulverizing death metal cacophony. Such planetary crossings are a constant presence right across the entire run time, which provide immense space for the album to breathe.
There are moments throughout the record where BI push their experimentation and incorporate sounds and ideas that they have never used before, and yet it all fits so seamlessly and perfectly into the band’s sound. The potency of the nastiest elements of this music is magnificently heightened by the textured and nuanced layers of calm interspersed throughout the album. They act not as simple cutaways, but are imbedded into each passage as a cohesive, vital component – the absence of which would undermine the impact of these pieces.
It remains to be seen what visual wonders await the physical release of the album, but in the digital realm, the first passage of the album Stargate features an incredible 20 minute short film, set to the soundtrack of and depicting the thematic journey covered in the entirety Side A of the album.
The visual creativity employed in this video accompaniment reaches the same otherworldly stratosphere of experimental intrigue that the music itself achieves, resulting in a 20-minute death metal music video for the ages. Must watch.
Side B’s The Message continues to captivate, layering thoughtful and adventurous elements of genuine musicality (clean vocals, major chords, chromatic scales), which then melt away to return to pulverizing riffs and deadly blastbeats. The album culminates in Tablet III of The Message — an 11 minute journey of prog infused death metal perfection. The continuous stacking of layers and sounds brings us to a blistering conclusion on a remarkable album.
There is so much to absorb and process within this record that repeat listening is an intuitively natural response, one that you will be powerless to prevent. So, just let it happen.
Absolute Elsewhere is available now via Century Media (Listen).
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