“Recognize one’s place within the dance / Know thy beat in time and whence to step / Through silent echoes we begin to grow / And seek the Oneness all beings know”
Could it really be that in our age of growing estrangement and divisiveness at least remarkably big parts of the Metal community and even music lovers from Elsewhere - are coming together as one in their shared admiration of a bunch of Demilich and Eloy nerds with an unreadable band logo from Colorado?

October fourth, when Absolute Elsewhere exploded everywhere, hasn’t been that long ago. But given the enormous wave of hype and appreciation Blood Incantation are riding on right now, this review of course already feels like arriving late to the party. Albeit I can assure you though that I’ve been floating through space to the Cosmic Death Metal of Absolute Elsewhere almost daily since then.

With its just two magnum-sized tracks “The Stargate” and “The Message” (both structured in three “tablets”) and the existential philosophical and spiritual themes, presented in an amalgan of genres each in themselves with a tendency to the bombastic, the album doesn’t need a particularly long total playing time to immediately feel larger than life. And despite the main ingredients being rather easy to spot it takes time to assort all the impressions which materialize here. When you concentrate on the beauty of the whole celestial body exposing itself to you, you lose sight of the details on the surface. And when you come close enough to spot them you can easily get lost in them, too.

I’ll try to take a step back and look at the greater picture now anyway:

Given that the evolution of music has always been cyclic, with new generations of artists discovering and reimagining the ever-growing body of work created before their own time, it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that parallel to the still ongoing classic Death Metal renaissance, the phenomenon of Metal bands incorporating different elements or even releasing radically departuring full albums, also celebrates a huge comeback. The audience reception has changed though. Where bands in the early 1990s often received a huge blowback for not sticking to their Metal core - and ahead of their time legends like Cynic even disbanded in frustration, only to feel the love for Focus spread through the scene many years later -, today people are much more receptive for adventures which take them beyond their personal comfort zone’s horizon.

Blood Incantation know this and have been testing the limits of the Technical Death Metal crowd’s tolerance thoroughly since Hidden History of the Human Race (2019), most notably of course with the full-on Klaus Schulze Ambient of Timewave Zero in 2022, but also with the advanced merging of their Death Metal and Kraut side on last year’s Luminiscent Bridge-EP.

There don’t appear to be many directions to go from there. Returning to Death Metal purity would seem small and like an appeasement of the minority of fans not on board with any of their experiments. At least this step would feel too soon. The other way to go is melting everything they’ve ever done together and add some new cherries on top. That Blood Incantation have chosen the latter option came pretty expected. The confident consequence however, in which the quartet approaches this challenge goes beyond what anyone could have seriously been hoping for:

We are inspired by Berlin school Electronica. So let’s a rent a ton of vintage equipment to emulate that authentically! In Berlin of course. In a studio full of even more fantastic analogue stuff, where already David Bowie and Tangerine Dream, but also Metal bands like Kreator have recorded. And while we’re at it: Why not even ask an active member of Tangerine Dream to contribute to one movement? Enter Thorsten Quaeschning for the trippiest dream sequence in tablet II of “The Stargate”!

Same with all the 70’s Prog Rock elements: Why not ask a more experienced professional for help? So Hällas-keyboardist Nicklas Malmqvist is providing lead synths, organ, piano and mellotron throughout the whole album.

Add to that all the synths and whatnot all members of Blood Incantation are already operating themselves, there’s really an enormous lot of fantastic extraterrestrial sounds washing through Absolute Elsewhere. Yet Paul Riedl also flexes his vocals far beyond the usual guturral growl, which is especially impressive during the second part of “The Message”. Not that he suddenly emerges as a multi-octave wunderkind or something like that, but playing a Pink Floyd tribute part and nailing the vocal harmonies so perfectly that it sounds like someone found actual lost recordings from the real Floyd, is at least a sign of extraordinary commitment.

Now don’t think that all these shenanigans distract Blood Incantation from also burning an ultra-blast of their trademark Morbid Angel-style Death Metal with sick, yet also beautiful and majestic lead guitars on top onto the tape! Within the by and large still predominant Metal parts there’s of course also room for other directions. The very first 30 seconds of the album could appear on a modern Voivod release down to the last detail. And there are more Thrash, yet also Power/Heavy Metal ideas spread over the whole thing. And sometimes when the Technical Death Metal whatthef***ery collides with keyboards this sounds like something Nocturnus wish they could have made in the early 90’s.

Actually almost everything on the album calls back to some genre bending (ex-)Death Metal band from thirty years ago. But where most of those were just scratching on the windshield of the spacecraft, being limited by lack of ideas, production possibilities and fan acceptance, and where Tiamat evolved from Clouds to Wildhoney in a haze of luck and weed, Blood Incantation bring a lot more record collector’s knowledge, skill and determination to the table. And just listen to the huge perfect sound of it all!

Ultimately, Absolute Elsewhere often feels like Ayreon as a Death Metal based project, only with four Arjen Lucassen madmen equally insane steering the ship - and way less concerned with catchiness. This album has a couple of great verses and choruses and overall many things which will stick in your head. The overall structure however is willingly chaotic. But it’s not the hellish maelstrom you might attribute to other longform Death Metal artists like Qrixkuor. This is rather a cosmic creative chaos, from which the music springs in seemingly random fashion, yet actually with a hidden masterplan behind it. It’s not meant to be deciphered in the code of traditional songwriting. But it’s great nonetheless and can easily be enjoyed for what it is at any given point, no matter what is going on.

So it doesn’t even matter if you agree with me on the point that conceptually Blood Incarnation isn’t doing a thing as novel as many fans and critics alike make it sound at the moment or not. Because the amazing execution and perfect alligning of stars around its making are exceptional anyway.

If you go all in and buy the four disc version of the album, you will also get surround mixes, the Luminiscent Bridge EP on CD for the first time, the interesting documentary All Gates Open and a complete second album, the one hour long Ambient soundtrack of that documentary. Yes, that’s an automatic recommendation for Timewave Zero fans.

These guys are just doing everything right, I guess. Even booking unusual yet fitting support acts like Midwife for North America and even more so Japanese Kraut Rockers Minami Deutsch for their 2025 European tour next year is just gold. And if you actually haven’t seen the brilliant, but also hilarious and charming mammoth video for “The Stargate” yet, please do yourself a favour and start your journey of exploring the Absolute Elsewhere here: