REVIEW: Blood Incantation — Hidden History of the Human Race
Denver band clinches the title of best death metal album of the year with a masterful sci-fi epic.
As the decade draws to a close perhaps we’ll look back on the 2010s as a golden age for space-themed metal music. In the ten years since the now cancelled Vektor teleported onto the scene with Black Future, metal acts of all shades have been probing the final frontier in ever-expanding ways. Recently, bands like Tomb Mold and Outer Heaven have explored the cosmos through a classic death metal formula. Voivod are still active, and fellow veterans Nocturnus AD have re-emerged. Elsewhere, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Toxic Holocaust have penned sci-fi dystopia thrash concept albums, while Sleep’s surprise 2018 record The Sciences saw the stoner metal gods excavating extra-planetary civilisations from the THC amber on tracks like ‘Marijuanaut’s Theme’ and ‘Giza Butler.’ We can go as far back as Black Sabbath’s unparalleled ‘Into The Void,’ but let’s put the past aside for now and ask: what do Blood Incantation have to say about Space Metal’s present and future? The answer is quite a lot.
This is what death metal should sound like as we descend towards the 2020s. A strong sense of tradition but never stifled by old school trappings. A deep progressiveness but never soulless technocracy. The frenzied guitar playing and blast-beat drumming of the opening track ‘Slave Species of the Gods’ jumps between a whole bunch of different ideas but always manages to settle on the finest riff. Dual guitar melodies play nicely in each ear, all brought together by booming death metal vocals. The reverb on the Paul Riedl’s voice makes the whole mix sound like it’s echoing off the walls of a dusty cavern. This is thick, bubbling production; guitars that sound like blood curdling screams and bubbling acid pits, double-kick drumming that adds so much where usually in this genre it takes away. The density of the mix never seems to mask the individual abilities of the musicians. We even get fretless bass fills almost as impressive as last year’s best death metal album, Idol by Horrendous.
Reading into the lyrics as much as one can on a death metal project, the band avoids any facile ‘aliens built the pyramids’ galaxy-braining, and focuses on the idea of something alien in the human soul, an unknowable continuum across thousands of years of death and rebirth. There is still a decent amount of harking on about cosmic overlords which is cool too. It’s all backed up with great musicianship, with phaser effects, glitchy pitch harmonics and the maturity to create just the right amount of chaos to imply order. As the final line of the album puts it: “Human life is merely a mosaic of endless parallel worlds and synchronistic events perceived by man as aimless chaos.” That’s what it sounds like.
‘The Giza Power Plant’ hurtles through more musical ideas at a sickening pace, covering lightyears of ground in just the first couple of minutes, but let’s focus on the song’s second act, where the band uses these winding guitar melodies to create a Lawrence of Arabia in Space type vibe. I think as listeners we should seek to avoid being too easily taken in by songs that try to evoke a stereotypical ‘middle-eastern flavour’. Rather, we should ask what the band is doing beyond over-simplistic use of harmonic minor scales. I don’t think Blood Incantation avoids the trap of metal orientalism entirely, but repeating the same simple melodic idea provides a foundation to do some very good musical world building on top. This sense of drama and dimension is one of the main strengths of the album. So much of this comes from the extraordinary energy of the drumming. The passage in question is a fairly languid one, so drummer Isaac Faulk has less pace-making duty and more freedom to explore. The guitarists and bassist cycle through their own improvisations with great virtuosity and a lightness of touch that’s so welcome in death metal. The band lives up to its name brilliantly in hypnotic moments like this. And yet you’re never relaxed, never comfortable, always a little bit scared about whatever the band is going to do next.
This is a valuable quality in a genre obsessed with how dramatically it can paint itself into corners. Good death metal requires you to be a little scared, a little disgusted, and it always needs something to push against. This is why so much death metal leaves me cold; I never believe it’s got more to offer. Blood Incantation don’t settle, they’re always try to bring something rhythmic, melodic, sonic or thematic that’s going to widen the cosmic scope. The ‘four long track’s approach helps with this sense of scale. It is an approach that suits them, but it can be hard to let the song lengths speak for themselves without a bit of laurel-resting from time to time.
The instrumental ‘Inner Paths (To Outer Space) is one occasion where perhaps they don’t quite stick the landing. It begins with a distant rumbling echo, with a great sense of magnitude, but the lead guitar riff that fades in is disappointingly incongruous. It’s a slight change of style, with the kind of discordant guitar lines and expressive drumming that reminds me of certain Mastodon songs. This is a crucial song in the run of the album in terms of determining whether the band is going to run out of ideas in the final act. What we get is a fairly cinematic interlude that holds our attention going into the gargantuan final track, but not a lot more than that.
What to make of the closer ‘Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul)’? We get some more frenzied soloing, some more pitch harmonics, and generally quite a lot out of the traditional death metal playbook. The novelty of the opening tracks is threatening to wear thin, but there is still a great feeling of layering and climax. There’s also some cascading evil laughter type sounds which I love. It’s probably the evilest song on the album, with a merciless staccato vocal delivery and incredible instrumental intensity. Six minutes in, everything stops. More sci-fi soundplay. The word that keeps springing to mind is cinematic. Which is always a good thing I reckon. Another brilliant change of pace ensues with more stellar guitar and drum work.
This is by far the biggest song on the album, but I fear it’s the one I’ll be coming back to the least. For all the technical brilliance on show, I still find myself still far more excited about the first half of the record. I think it works if you’re sitting down to listen to the album in full, whereas tracks one and two do the job if you just want to put your cosmic death metal playlist on shuffle. By the time the slower melodies kick in around the fourteen minute mark you’re impressed but quite ready for it to be over. The loneliness of the final three minutes gives a very good sense of an ending. Clean, guitars, no drums. Lovely.
A sense of cinema is essential for a band with such lofty thematic goals and ambitious song lengths. Blood Incantation delivers this in the finale, so it’s a bit of a conundrum why I feel ever so slightly lukewarm by the end of Hidden History’s 37 minutes. I think a lot of it comes down to personal preference. It’s very rare for me to be 100% captivated by a death metal album from start to finish. For more diehard death metal fans however, this writhing mass of album brings a wealth of ideas to the table and most of them land beautifully.
Metal music about space is as old as metal music itself. I think the genre’s kinship with sci-fi comes down to two slightly contradictory truths: 1) the aching void of the universe is perfect for making the darkest music. 2) Aliens are cool. The old Arthur C. Clarke adage comes to mind: “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” Blood Incantation take the second possibility and see it through to its terrifying conclusion.
