Forgive me, ahem, a dollop of civic pride: right now Denver has the best basketball player in Nikola Jokić and the best death metal band in Blood Incantation. (Sorry Tomb Mold, you’re Giannis). That’s pretty good for the 19th most populous city in the US.
What’s wild is that I don’t even know if Blood Incantation even consider themselves a death metal band anymore. Other than their incomprehensible spider web of a logo, they’ve left many of the signifiers of death metal behind.
Their latest album Absolutely Everywhere has been making the rounds on year end lists, which in itself is astonishing for a death metal band, but I think it’s probably because they’ve transcended the genre. Absolutely Everywhere, their fourth LP, follows one of the hardest left turns in metal history. After establishing themselves as a top tier metal act, Blood Incantation released Timewave Zero, an album entirely composed of ambient music. No drums. No guitars. No cookie monster vocals. Hell, no vocals at all.
Last week we discussed the growing pains of Liars’ second album so that they could achieve the successes of their third and fourth. Blood Incantation needed to make an album in which they fiddled with synthesizers to lay the foundation to create Absolutely Everywhere, which seamlessly fuses their earlier death metal to Timewave Zero’s cosmic drone. Krautrock and death metal are not necessarily complementary styles. This isn’t peanut butter and chocolate. But Blood Incantation makes them work together. Ever had a watermelon and feta salad? Pretty good.
However, I’m not here to praise Absolutely Everywhere because you can find that content…absolutely everywhere (sorry). Today’s album is more personal to me, their second, Hidden History of the Human Race, which got me into death metal.
I dipped my toes into the extreme end of the metal swimming pool a little later than most. Although I was a fan of thrash and Slayer in my 20s, I hit a hard wall with Napalm Death, who I either thought was too scary or too goofy, and figured I better stick with more well-adjusted bands like The Jesus Lizard, Swans, and Rapeman.
Just like with drugs and sex, eventually the “usual” stopped doing it for me, and I needed more extreme guitar perversion: enter death metal, black metal, doom metal, grindcore.
The coolest trick of death metal is that it can, on a dime, turn something that sounds like a robot manufacturing plant being bombed into an elegant, pastoral moment of tranquility. Where the late David Lynch’s films exposed the ugly rot at the core of placid American existence, death metal shows the opposite: it shows us the beauty in the rot. It shows us that a moment of grace is only a harmonized solo away. At its best, death metal turns chaos into order. It’s like waking in heaven after being tortured to death.
Although the genre began as an outlet for speed- and riff-obsessed teenagers to write songs about decapitated heads giving cunnilingus, it has evolved into a more, dare I say, spiritual enterprise. Today’s death metal bands embrace the unknowable and seem as interested in examining what happens after the blood stops flowing as they are in its spurting. Then again, maybe death metal has always been interested in the afterlife. How else do you explain a severed head that can still perform oral sex?
The History of the Human Race takes the existentialism one step further, postulating that life itself is but a mere refraction on a multi-dimensional prism of existence. Life is but a dream within a dream within a wet bag of guts. Or something. Honestly, considering that it sounds like they’re sung through a clogged garbage disposal, lyrics aren’t exactly the selling point of Blood Incantation.
No, it’s about the riffs, the blast beats, and how they layer atop one another. Blood Incantation can build a nest of noise as dense as any four-piece in existence – which they often push into overdrive with a phasor effect that sounds like the band has entered a wind tunnel; it functions as the audio equivalent of the Vertigo-zoom, intensifying without actually adding new elements. But where they excel is their use of dynamics. The History of the Human Race, which was recorded on analog tape, has the feel of a live band. Even its abrupt stops feel organic, and its spiralling crescendos grow so gradually, they feel inevitable.
History even has a touch of the synthesizers that Blood Incantation would grow so fond of. An arpeggiator turns “Awakening from the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul)” into Dark Side of the Moon for a brief minute, until the crushing metal begins again.
Although Absolutely Everywhere is the correct place for ANY fan of guitar music to jump onto the Blood Incantation train, I have to recommend The History of the Human Race for potential future sickos for death metal. Come on in, droogie, the water is fetid.
