When you've been around for thirty years, maintaining a level of excellence is sometimes difficult for any band. However, INCANTATION have not slowed down in all this time. Well, unless you count their doom-infused form of death metal. In that case, the doom crushes us album after album with a two-ton boot of bloody steel spikes. Is it any wonder John McEntee's filthy, sludgy guitars and guttural regurgitations have enveloped us in its rapture?
Eleventh studio album from these Pennsylvania death dealers doesn't disappoint. Chuck Sherwood (bass) and Kyle Severn (drums and infamous mustache) round out the mayhem, adding to John's brilliant riffs. Opener 'Muse' is a bludgeoning introduction to a consuming album of pure grime and destruction. The guitars seethe, breathe and exhale a noxious fume to steal the souls of weak children. 'Rites of the Locust' spirals downward, with thunderous, steady drumming and blood-curdling vocals. And then there's doom. A slow, slithering miasma of an abomination, 'Visceral Hexahedron' lingers at every strum of the guitar...just long enough to freeze our veins solid before shattering into a million shards of rapid, bestial chaos. 'The Horns of Gefrin' is another upbeat death metal epiphany before 'Incorporeal Despair' brings us down into a sloth-paced, motion-stopping beast of a song. Live, 'Xipe Totec' will destroy any venue it's played in. There's no way even the non-moshers will be able to stand still on this one. 'Lus sepulcri' continues the fury with skull-splitting anger. 'Stormgate convulsions From the Thunderous Shores of Infernal Realms Beyond the Grace of God' is an ambient break in the album before returning with doom-laden 'Messiah Nostrum', steady 'Omens To the Altar of Onyx' and ending with 'Ancients Arise', a mid-paced, suffocating delivery of good old-fashioned INCANTATION excellence.
Three decades of thriving death/doom have proven INCANTATION is a combination of perseverance, brilliance and power unlike any other. "Profane Nexus" will please most fans and most likely gain new ones.
David Simonton