Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere

Here we go again. As soon as you finish your top 10 list, someone comes along to fuck it up. This year it’s Blood Incantation’s turn.

“Hey,” one of my best buddies said a few weeks ago, “you have to listen to this and make it to the end.” The band was of course Blood Incantation, a death metal band with an unreadable logo and thus, common sense prevailing, not something I would personally jive with all that well. The song was The Stargate (Tablet I) and it started out exactly how I thought it would; big, loud, heavy with lots of frantic drums and death growls. Things I can tolerate in doses but not an entire album. Then, two minutes in, The Thing™ that my mate knew I would love, happened. Suddenly, out of nowhere, The Stargate (Tablet I) turned full seventies prog in a Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd sort of way. Artsy space rock cleverly concealed in a death metal album by a band with a logo that looks like a stack of twigs.

Hailing from Denver, Colorado in the United States, Blood Incantation makes progressive cosmic death metal, for want of a better description. A technical death metal band first and foremost, they however blend their core death metal sound with ambient music (Tablet II), ethereal samples (also Tablet II), big brooding spoken word à la Bal-Sagoth (Tablet III) and a healthy dose of ye olde prog from way back when. The entirety of Absolute Elsewhere is, at first, a weird mish-mash of styles that don’t seem to work together. For instance, there’s a bit in Tablet II that sounds like the creepy foreboding windwood sounds heard in Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds. Then it’s disjointed cords for a while before the band dives back into full death metal mode on Tablet III.

The same goes for The Messenger which, just as The Stargate, consists of three tablets. Just like The Stargate, it starts out with technical death metal. Then Tablet II starts and about halfway through turns into something so Pink Floyd it’s rather uncanny. With the ethereal keyboards, the laid-back guitars and the clean vocals, it sounds like an Animals track that got cut from the final recordings. If you would let a hundred or so Floyd fans listen to this, I’ll bet at least half of them would think it’s a B-side track they’ve never heard before. It’s a super relaxed interlude in a whirlwind of soundscapes, like the middle part of Floyd’s Dogs. That makes the impact of Tablet III all the lot bigger when it bursts out into frantic death metal.

Absolute Elsewhere is a remarkable thing. Part krautrock, part art rock, part seventies psychedelica all wrapped up in a death metal coat. The musicianship here is outstanding, and though it might seem like a disjointed mess at first glance, this is definitely a meticulously structured album with recurringing motifs and a really well thought-out flow throughout this forty-three minute odyssey. And when I say odyssey, I really mean it. Blood Incantation takes us on a journey through the stars, and Absolute Elsewhere, excellent as it is, works best with headphones, a clear mind and a readiness to be swept away on that journey. You will not be disappointed.

Label: Century Media Records

Buy it here: https://bloodincantation.bandcamp.com/album/absolute-elsewhere

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