Blood Incantation – Hidden History of the Human Race (Review)

This is the second album from US death metal band Blood Incantation.

2016’s Starspawn was a very notable album, making it onto my end of year list for that year too. As such, there’s been plenty of excitement and expectation for Hidden History of the Human Race. Despite only having four tracks, this new release has not disappointed at all.

Hidden History of the Human Race takes all of the strengths from Starspawn and essentially delivers more of the same, only with even greater confidence, skill, and improved songwriting.

This is brutal death metal augmented by progressive atmosphere and mood. With plenty of space to combine technical and progressive flourishes with raw harshness, these songs are as brutal as any old-school death metal monster, while also having that special ingredient that allows them to wield an emotive component like a jagged weapon. Brutality is not enough for Blood Incantation; you have to feel the music too.

Numberless engaging riffs assail the listener from the very start, with squealing solos and slicing melodies. However, there’s far more than just that on this release, including moments of psychedelia and avant-garde aspects. The creativity demonstrated on this superlative album with such a time-worn genre is breathtaking, and each song is very different, covering so much ground. Yes, this is a very varied and diverse record, in many ways. Across the course of Hidden History of the Human Race the band take us on a wild ride through a wide variety of the different subgenres and permutations of death metal that have ever existed, sometimes many of them in just one song.

The streaks of progressive metal that coloured Starspawn are more prominent here, marking one of the more obvious developments from the band’s debut album. These reveal themselves slowly across the songs, culminating in the 18-minute behemoth Awakening from the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul), which is multifaceted atmospheric brutality incarnate.

Blood Incantation’s grasp of what makes death metal so great is so strong that they threaten to break it in two.

Intelligently crafted, and bigger and better than ever before, Blood Incantation have just released a death metal album that will definitely be regarded as a classic.