This is old school old school. More than any album I can recall this year this record sounds like a band doing one or two take shots and living with what they get. All the tightness – or lack thereof – comes from rehearsal. The sound is live, period. The only studio enhancements would be the environment this disc was recorded in. So the question is, does that make for a good or bad record?
Good. Maybe not good the way a 666 record is good, but good in a cleansing, no bullshit way. This is a good band playing good songs and no other thing. You have to be good to go this agricultural, and Incantation pull it off with ease. It’s not that they are playing music that is intricate enough to throw a decent band, but more that they are playing like naturals, like they were born to the music; an organ of pure death metal.
None of this should come as news to fans, of course, but to the uninitiated metalheads this is something to look into. The songs are never terribly fast, and sometimes become doomishly slow, with the kind of pure distortion that makes your hair shrivel at a live show. The drums are one of my favorite aspects of this disc, though. Deep, expansive and kittish, they truly sound like a set of drums instead of a Trent Reznor epileptic seizure – nothing against NIN.
The production is minimal, but apparent. The sound, for all its immediacy is also very clean. You can hear everything you need to, including occasional fuckups. It’s not going to blow the speakers out in your superfly Honda FnF2 go nowherefast special, but it makes the points that need to be made.
All in all I have to call this a success, if not a must have. It’s pure, clean and evil death metal the way it was…well, not meant to be played, but played before computers made it possible for any kid with a grand to make a professional sounding recording. It’s a damned good mix of doomish riffs and death metal pummel that ought to make any real lover of the form produce a satisfied grimace of hate and antichristian malice. No awards, no end of year list, but a solid entry from a solid band!
