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.
Stretching their sci-fi sagas across two sprawling 20-minute tracks—each one helpfully subdivided into three smaller “Tablets” for ease of navigation—Blood Incantation reach their heaviest heights yet by showing just how soft they can go. If sameness is death metal’s Achilles heel, they counter by filling even their songs’ subsections with so many passages and transitions that each one practically has an album’s worth of ideas. Within two minutes of Absolute Elsewhere’s opening assault, the group drops everything to trudge through a galactic swamp of dubbed-out drums and bubbling, Cluster-like arpeggios. When a squiggling neon synth solo finally pierces the fog, you’d think you were at a Pink Floyd laser light show where the technician kept switching the speaker system over to a Morbid Angel CD.
Prog metal has often been defined by its dedication to virtuosity, but Blood Incantation’s strain is more concerned with pure zoneage. There are flairs of Opeth’s clean acoustic balladry, Dream Theater’s surreal symphonics, and Atheist’s spidery fretwork, but Blood Incantation’s obsession with everything hypnotic and kosmische informs even their heaviest riffs. In the back half of “The Message [Tablet I],” they slow their charge to a lurch, casting off phantasmal pinch harmonics that loop upward like distress signals transmitting through the dark. On “The Stargate [Tablet II],” after soaring through a dense cloud of synths (from Tangerine Dream’s own Thorsten Quaeschning) and a glistening acoustic jam dappled with fluttering Mellotron, the band suddenly unleashes a pummeling one-chord stomp. Isaac Faulk’s apocalyptic drums ratchet up the intensity one notch at a time, while Riedl and Morris Kolontyrsky wrench dissonant high notes out of their guitars as if they were trying to steer a comet. It’s a total curtain pull, the group’s prog paradise shattered to reveal some unholy cosmic truth underneath.
That theatricality shows just how confident Blood Incantation have become. Countless moments throughout Absolute Elsewhere feel genuinely playful: the cheesy drum fill that kicks off the finale of “The Message [Tablet III]”; Riedl interrupting the inspirational opening gallop of “The Message [Tablet I]” to shout “WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?” in his wizardlike snarl; the gradual acceleration toward the end of “The Message [Tablet II]” that swells like every Floyd album being played at once. There are multiple instances where the band stops on a dime only to come roaring back a second later, as if the hyperspeed finally kicked into gear. It’s sick every time. The group treats its riffs as if they actually have a reason to be there, so that each ritualistic return to headbanging feels both surprising and earned.
In lesser hands, stringing together so many classic reference points could come off like regressive record-collector metal. Yet every passing homage to Camel and King Crimson manages to sound like the best moments from the Prog Archives stirred into an iridescent whirlpool, with the group’s tech-death binding it all together as if it were the ultimate endpoint for this kind of rock’n’roll escapism. Blood Incantation not only understand, but delight in what makes the best prog endure: lush textures, dizzying interplay, undeniable groove, a sense of worlds beyond. Toward the end of the album, the band digs into an unsuspectingly aching black-metal churn, the maelstrom building to supernova levels as Riedl’s screams stretch to an infinite howl. Just when it can’t seem to get any bigger, it all gets swept away, echoing out to some arcane, far-off land, where fantasy is alive and the riffs roam free.
