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BLOOD INCANTATION
Absolute Elsewhere

Century Media (2024)
Rating: 8.5/10

Continuing to baffle and astound, Denver, Colorado-based death metal experimentalists Blood Incantation reach further into the unknown with their first full-length album in five years.

The first time I listened to this opus I wanted to immediately rename the band Blood Floyd, such are the cosmic variations and forever twisting landscape trips. Sure, you’ll get your death metal injection, but such robust notions are few and far between as the celestial combo concentrates on crafting colossal, cinematic somewhere in-between John Zorn and David Lynch.

Ahead of the album’s release, Blood Incantation dropped a 20 minute video for ‘The Stargate’, a mesmeric black and white film punctuated by jarring death metal outbursts which drift into pastoral trickles hinting towards Tangerine Dream which prompt me to start reading Carl Sagan.

Absolute Elsewhere is an incredibly immersive experience featuring some truly innovative death metal alongside the blisters of palatial surrealism. Throughout this album the guys seamlessly drift between dollops of cold black metal, jazzy prog, crushing death metal and daring emotive and eerie displays.

There’s nothing inaccessible about such constructions; each chapter may be unpredictable but the layering is so soft and creative that you end up frothing with excitement and anticipation at the next plateau. However, the real reason Blood Incantation should be praised so highly is their ability to sew all this together as one wholesome structure because in less capable hands this would so easily be a mess of loose ends and art for arts sake pretension and self indulgence.

Many – especially death metal fans – have been highly critical of some of Blood Incantation’s manoeuvres, but the band cares not for limitations and restriction as shades of Opeth merge with Cynic where a flutter of bongo drums cavort with a mesmeric dissonant chord while a firmly plucked bass line accompanies a haunting sweep.

Blood Incantation has become a difficult beast to review but not to listen to, so be thankful then that such avant garde meandering has occurred to save us from the ever festering swamp of gore bands. Grab your headphones and dive into this sprawling void. There’s no other place like it at the moment.

Neil Arnold

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