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INVOCATION
The Archaic Sanctuary (Ritual Body Postures)

Iron Bonehead Productions (2024)
Rating: 8/10

Although one of several extreme metal acts to share the moniker Invocation, this particular trio demands your attention with a riveting debut album. Hailing from Valparaíso in Chile, the peculiarly named Sense Of Premonition (vocals and guitar), Sense Of Clairvoyance (bass), Sense Of Clairaudience (drums) drag you into their atmospheric depths four years after their second EP Attunement To Death.

With this debut full-length album, Invocation manages to sound cavernous, evil and musty and yet without ever resorting to anything remotely gloomy or coated in doom. What helps here is the fact that what could easily have been titanic tracks in length, have been trimmed to robust yet raw assaults. That’s not to say this isn’t colossal, but it’s very much to the point in its aggression.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, there’s something in the Chilean soil which produces bands of this ilk. Organic, grim, evil and furious, Invocation unleashes Hell on the likes of ‘Ecstatic Trance’ with a barrage of vile percussion and blackened riffs which rush like tides of icy blood. The menace is ever present, particularly in those sneering throaty vocals, but the real sinister ingredient is the ability of the trio to mix violent speed with more methodical strains of wickedness.

Everything here is delivered with such a sinister snap while also existing as grandiose and arrogant, almost as if the creators are mocking us, the listener, as not worthy. ‘The Serpent Of Faardal’ is measured, cocksure, but daubed in slick black light, whereas ‘Opium Thebiacum (Somniferum)’ features immense stabbing percussion and more riff tirades that reverberate off cold stone walls like ghastly fleeting shadows.

Each musical statement is served up like some ancient scroll of esoteric wisdom but given a soundtrack of blinding hail and blasphemous and possessed tumult. It’s metal of a maddening quality, the kind of creepy cacophony that just exists like an underground river of gushing slime. Evil has indeed found a new home, and its name is Invocation.

Neil Arnold

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