Blood Incantation & Elder at The 1865, Southampton
“Screaming so loud in the dark. Calling someplace behind the soul of time.”
It’s easy for the modern music industry to make you cynical. In an age of tiktok-focused music marketing and songs designed for virality, both fans and musicians alike grapple with a creeping anxiety – the feeling that the music industry of the early digital age, for all its faults, is gone. Every now and then, though, a band defies the advice that every music marketer has been parroting for years, and explodes in popularity anyway.
Blood Incantation’s meteoric rise cannot be owed to a viral hook, 150 cringe-inducing Instagram reels, or deep-rooted industry connections. They’re perhaps the greatest extreme metal success story of the past decade: a band propelled to the upper echelons of the genre by an incredible album alone. An album as dense as it is captivating, as opaque as it is compelling.
Tonight, in one of Southampton’s biggest venues, Blood Incantation brought their newest record, Absolute Elsewhere, to a packed-in crowd, 750 people strong. Supporting them is psych-prog visionaries Elder, also supporting their latest full-length, released just three weeks ago. This is a special show. A chance for two shining lights of heavy music to prove that they deserve their spot, and deserve to continue their upwards trajectory into the stratosphere.
Elder
Elder are not the first, second, or even tenth band you might think of when listing bands that would fit on a bill with Blood Incantation. The safe choice would’ve been to pick another abstract death metal act, one to pummel the audience into submission before the main event arrives. Instead, Elder are here to ease people into the night. Kaleidoscopes of psychedelic textures drape over smooth, ever shifting time signatures, blanketing the building in dissocia. Thoughtful, minimalist riffs give way to walls of colour and peace, before returning again to propel the set forward.
As the set continues, it becomes clear that Elder are the perfect act to open this bill. Each song builds upon itself before detouring into another emotional corner, coaxing you into a reflection on your life outside of this moment, gently lowering you further into yourself. The warmth with which Elder’s set pushes the audience into tranquility provides a unique atmosphere for a death metal show: one of peace, quiet, and thoughtfulness. Here’s hoping that the success of this tour leads to more nights where Elder can cleanse the recesses of my blast-beat-saturated brain.
Blood Incantation
On a stage enclosed by monoliths covered in ancient script, Blood Incantation appear. Almost instantly, the audience is raptured into a place without time or space. Over the next 44 minutes, Blood Incantation prove that they deserve the spot they are catapulting towards, delivering a titanic rendition of their best work. Somehow, some way, Absolute Elsewhere is even more impactful live. Every odd-time blast and riff feels delirious, and every detour into Floyd-esque prog feels euphoric. At the halfway point of the record, it becomes clear that the room is split down the middle. Pits break out and close, people throw limbs and enact violence. Just as many people are stunned into utter stillness, a glassy look in their eyes as if in a prog-death induced fugue state. It becomes obvious how such an inaccessible band managed to fill such a large space. “Absolute Elsewhere” is the most essential prog-death album since Planetary Duality, and the album recording pales in comparison to what Blood Incantation can do live.
As “The Message [Tablet 3]” draws to a close, the room erupts, breaking free of the spell that’s been broadcasting for the best part of an hour. There’s the feeling that the show could end here, and the people of Southampton would still be raving about the immensity of the performance they witnessed here tonight. Just as the audience return to this plane of reality, frontman Paul Riedl announces that there’s still more to come. The band whip through a selection of songs from their back catalogue, gripping the audience again. The colossal “Obliquity of the Ecliptic” draws the set to a close 30 minutes later, ending the band’s 75-minute marathon of brutality and psychedelia.
There’s a special feeling you get when you see a band that you know are destined to be one of the biggest names that extreme metal has ever seen. Blood Incantation’s rise has been meteoric, and if they keep putting out performances like tonight’s, this rise will only continue. It’s hard to envision a future where Blood Incantation’s name isn’t mentioned alongside others in the death metal pantheon, considered equals to Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, and maybe even Death. I hope with all my heart that Blood Incantation stick around for a long, long time, and continue to transport unsuspecting audiences into the cold abyss of space.
