For many, the first awareness of Blood Incantation came with their 2019 Albums of the Year charting, "Hidden History Of The Human Race". This assembly of tracks took their sound into truly progressive, inventive death metal with intermittent passages of song structures and a haunting intergalactic bent to the lyrical themes. Technical and occasionally delirious in its precision, the performances are precise without being flashy, and occasionally ornate in their psychedelia without the encumbrances of gaudiness. Tangents are taken into doom and meditative synth workouts, which then return to death metal riffs and unexpected structural shifts, all executed with assurance. All of the above are considered in their exploration of influences and newly formed manifestations of form by The Quietus, in their "Expanding the Circle: Blood Incantation Interviewed". In recent years with the advent of their "Timewave Zero", the band have leaned harder into the realms of progressive rock and German kosmische which they had previously only hinted at, delivering a work of unadulterated cosmic synthesizer workouts with last year's, "Luminescent Bridge". These sounds have now come into a fully realized synergy with the death metal and technical proficiency of their earlier work, producing in "Absolute Elsewhere", a maximal music and culmination of all of their broadly heterogeneous styles and forms. This masterful feat of genre-fusion found great praise in the pages of The Quietus, and in a rare moment of unrestrained ebullience, The Wire proclaimed; "It belongs on the shelf alongside Pestilence’s "Testimony of The Ancients and Spheres", The Orb’s "UFOrb", and Pink Floyd’s "Wish You Were Here". It’s a goddamn masterpiece.".
The above making Blood Incantation a prime representative of the voracious genre-expansive developments currently flowing through experimental metal. These sounds have now come to encompass melodicism and atmospheres lifted from shoegaze and spacerock, eruptions of heavy psych rock, industrial drumming, synth exploration and electronic atmospheres, and pure experimental noise. The voluminous body of which is detailed in Brad Sanders' essential overview, "Untrue And International: Living in a Post-Black Metal World", with complimentary curation from this sphere found in the excellent selections of The Quietus' Columnus Metallicus. These articles sound the deep expanse of these movements, which are sourced from labels like, Hydrahead, Neurot, Ipecac, Deathwish, 20 Buck Spin, Dark Descent, Sargent House, Profound Lore, Season of Mist, Roadburn, Century Media, Relapse, and The Flenser. Having passed the milestone of its tenth anniversary, The Flenser's founder Jonathan Tuite, described its ethos to New Noise magazine, which could be surmised as, "The Flenser Is a One-Man Pursuit of Quality Doom". In one the aesthetic fringes of the label, resides the hushed slowcore of Madeline Johnston’s Midwife project. This shadowy corner of existence is expressed in her "ability to wrench ecstasy from devastation, to make romance out of abject pain, and to transmute specific feelings into an ineffable longing", as heard on "Luminol", and the even moreso on the inward-looking "No Depression in Heaven". Together, the two bands will be bringing audiences into their fold at Seattle's Substation, transporting venues across North America into the absolute-elsewhere-space of their tour this fall.
