There’s a moment halfway through the making-of documentary for Blood Incantation’s new album that unlocks everything you need to know about the Denver death-metal band. Sitting in front of a whiteboard filled with diagrams mapping out every new-age synth solo, krautrock interlude, and blastbeat slam, lead singer Paul Riedl listens back to the studio recording. As his vocal part comes up, he shuts his eyes, holding his hands in chalice formation as he imitates his own inhumane screams. The moment it’s done, he giggles like an excited schoolboy. The rest of the band quietly nod one by one: “Sweet.” “Sick.” “Hell yeah.” Sixty years into the genre, the spirit of metal lives on.
Though many a band have sought to elevate metal in their own way, there’s a winking absurdity to the way Blood Incantation approach the task. They want to be more than simply another OSDM band, to be sure, but while they aren’t afraid of the occasional ambient zone-out, the quartet takes metal higher by leaning deeper into the genre’s essential nerdiness, rather than trying to escape it. Hidden History of the Human Race, with its psychedelic aura of alien conspiracies and dedication to shredding with third eye open, captured the zonked-out magic of alternating dorm-room bong hits with drooling over the gory details of your roommate’s Cannibal Corpse posters.
While their spiritual siblings in Tomb Mold hinted at a proggier turn on last year’s The Enduring Spirit, on Absolute Elsewhere, Blood Incantation take that mission to heart by going straight to the source. Where Tomb Mold found a path to the heavens in the ’80s guitar tones of the Blue Nile and the Durutti Column, Blood Incantation use the ’70s as a launchpad to plunge into the starless prog-rock abyss, balancing the pastoral splendor of Yes and Popol Vuh with the profane madness of Gorguts and Demilich. Absolute Elsewhere is drenched in a murky incense stench; recorded in Berlin’s famed Hansa Studios, where Brian Eno’s graffiti from his sessions with Bowie still decorates the walls, and half the equipment comes marked with stickers to denote which pieces are Tangerine Dream originals, Blood Incantation give themselves free rein to follow their geekiest impulses all the way to Valhalla. The result is their most adventurous music yet, an ode to the time-honored lava-lamp sesh that pays tribute to their forebears while staking a claim to the band’s own shadowy corner of the universe.
