"Timewave Zero" de Blood Incantation (2022

When Blood Incantation announced that their new studio release would be an ambient and atmospheric album, few of us could have guessed what the death metal quartet from Denver (Colorado) was up to after having given birth to two works as colossal as Hidden History Of The Human Race (2019) and their debut album, Starspawn, from 2016. The band formed by Isaac Faulk on drums, Jeff Barrett on bass, Morris Kolontyrsky on guitar and Paul Riedl combining his duties as guitarist and vocalist debuted in 2015 with a splendid EP such as Interdimensional Extinction, an authentic example of old school death metal with which they made it clear what their label would be when it was time to release their first full-length, a year after Interdimensional Extinction.

Since then they have released a live album, Live Vitrification (2018), and their devastating second album, Hidden History Of The Human Race, released in 2019 under the Dark Descent Records label. In this latest studio work, the increase in psychedelic elements in their compositions was already noticeable, including synthesizers and keyboards with a dark sound that generated an atmosphere very consistent with the depth that the band wanted to convey with their music. This evolution suited the Colorado quartet wonderfully and both critics and audiences succumbed to the charms of Blood Incantation, yours truly included.

With three years of high school to give life to their new spawn, few of us would have imagined that the band would opt for an ambient album after blowing our minds with Hidden History Of The Human Race, to the point of practically eliminating death metal from the equation to focus solely and exclusively on an album that walks between darkwave and dungeon synth with certain touches of the Germans CAN or Tangerine Dream, authentic banners of krautrock that emerged in the late sixties in West Germany. In addition to the purest electronic part that we find in Timewave Zero, there are certain elements that remind us of Biosphere or Vangelis, thus suggesting a connection with bands like Atrium Carceri, Sun O))), Ulver or Velvet Caccoon, with certain remnants of the most eclectic Burzum from the late nineties.

Timewave Zero is divided into only two pieces, Io and Ea, both divided into four movements in which Blood Incantation explores all kinds of dark melodies in electronic form, completely ignoring all the material the band has previously worked on. For forty long minutes, not so long in reality, the quartet explores all kinds of ideas far removed from their original death metal to expand universes as if it were the soundtrack of Tron (1982, Steven Lisberger). From the original movie, of course. The astral journey proposed by the Colorado quartet is made up of an enormous amount of psychedelic elements that could well accompany the mythical scene in which David Bowman, the last living crew member of Discovery One, descends to the surface of Jupiter near the moon Io in Stanley Kubrick‘s glorious adaptation of the magnificent novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke. As a curious fact, the first piece of this Timewave Zero shares its title with the aforementioned moon on which Bowman finds the last monolith of 2001, perhaps it is pure coincidence.

It is clear that this EP is not what many will expect from a band like Blood Incantation, especially considering the previous work of its four members, but it is a solid album that I recommend listening to carefully. If you are ready to embark on a sidereal journey, if hard drugs are your thing and you want to go on a quality musical trip, if you are not afraid to experiment and know how to value the quality of the compositions over the genre to which a band claims to belong , I am sure that Timewave Zero will completely dazzle you and captivate you once you fully enter its game. If you’re not willing to let go of your beliefs about what a band should sound like, forget about this album, even though you’ll be missing out on a true gem. It’s pretty clear to me.