Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere (2024)

3★

Seeing as BLOOD INCANTATION are a pack of Colorado's own, we've gotta support our boys. That being said, their new album, Absolute Elsewhere, is a bit of a dramatic shift for these cosmic death metallers, and we aren't going to sugarcoat that fact.

First things first, this album is more about atmosphere than it is about pummeling riffage or insane rhythms. They make use of a lot of melodic phrasing, including both long instrumental passages of beautiful guitar solos as well as Berlin School-style synths, allowing us to envision a supposed voyage through space and time. Amongst these passages live an occasional deep growly vocal and some techy riffs that sound like they've ran a calculator through a Marshall stack. That being said, when the actual death metal parts of this album kick in, they go insanely hard -- divebombs galore, fast shreddy solos, and a heapin' pile of trem-picked riffs. Unfortunately that's just a small portion of the album as like mentioned prior, it's reliant more on sound collage and atmosphere than riffs and complex songwriting like seen on both Starspawn and Hidden History of the Human Race.

We'll boil it down to this: This is not the same BLOOD INCANTATION you know and love. This is the band really reaching out and exploring their other musical influences, mainly progressive rock and Berlin School (like said above) -- they even got Thorsten Quaeschning of Tangerine Dream to play on "The Stargate [Tablet II]." While some bands are quite good at incorporating this sound into their music, BLOOD INCANTATION just isn't really the band we want to see that from. In many ways, Absolute Elsewhere suffers the same way Chapel of Disease's Echoes of Light from earlier this year did. Too many things trying to mesh together and ultimately creating a weird mess of sounds, sometimes working but mostly missing.

It's interesting, to say the least, just don't go into it expecting the sort of Morbid Angel worship they were doing earlier in their career.

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FAVORITE TRACKS: “The Stargate [Tablet I],” “The Message [Tablet II]”

FOR FANS OF: Nocturnus, Chapel of Disease, Timeghoul

Encyclopædia Metallum

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