Review by Rexorcist for Blood Incantation - Starspawn (2016)

I'm extraordinarily happy that I finally get to catch up on Blood Incantation.  Checking out all of their earlier demos and EP's that I could find, I was flat-out excited for their debut album, Starspawn, which was the album that put them on the metal map.  At first I didn't pay a lot of attention to them, as death isn't necessarily my favorite metal subgenre and RYM year chart ratings are practically dominated by metalheads.  Hell, right now the number one album for 2025 is the new Deafheaven.  However, to be able to say that I am the first to write a Metal Academy review for this album after having been released for almost ten years seems almost impossible to me, so I'll just roll with it and accept the honor.  But before I review it, lemme fill you in on something the band confirmed about this debut album: "Everything was done live with tubes, tape, etc – there are no triggers, click-tracks or quantized anything on the recording, no cut & paste and very few punch-ins."

A minute and a half in and I was already wide-eyed.  Blood Incantation struggled to find their sound and the proper structural techniques needed to really standout for a while, but this album seemed to make a point of harmony in the whole band pretty damn early on.  This one is CREEPY.  Right on the opening 13-minute epic (super bold move for a 35-minute album with five tracks), the band makes their their darkest release so far, ripping the very idea of riffs in half with some incredible and very disturbing tricks that suck you right into a psychedelic black hole and then, as Sarris would say, "tears through it like tissue paper."  It's not even a new step forward in death metal by any means whatsoever.  This is the standard, straightforward death metal sound with masterful progressive behavior.  The build-up issues and unpredictability of their previous EP, Interdimensional Extinction, are fixed to perfection, made seemingly effortless, like if Fix-It Felix just lightly struck his golden magic hammer to it.  The outstanding production works in tandem with Reidl's and Kolontyrsky's guitars.  Although everyone is working at max power, the show stealers are the two guitarists.  There's a beautiful presence their just forged from dark matter, driving the amazing, disturbing and sometimes psychedelic guitar work through the production's incredible ambiance.  I may even go as far as to say that this became my new favorite death metal track.

Next was Choaplasm, and I began it immediately thinking to myself, "There's no way they're going to top that first track, right?  But they can at least come close with the upcoming songs."  This one's more metronomical, and a bit more brutal and effectively primitive because of it.  It's also much more vocal, allowing our singer Riedl to make the most of the verses he sings and the ambient textures created through the production.  At a short five minutes, this song did a great job of continuing the presence of the previous song with a more primitive approach.  The real challenge was how to put a spin on things with track three, Hidden Species (ViB Pt. II).  Now as it's a part two, does that mean the wild balance of varying elements becomes the determining factor in yet another song, hinting at repetition?  Yes and no.  This song shoves astral ambiance down your throat without getting in the way of the rest of the band doing its job while giving Riegl plenty of time to sing.  It appears that the dark ambient genre had a say in the atmospheric choices of this song, allowing drawn out reverb to take over the atmosphere and leaving drummer Isaac Faulk to take over with his incredible jazz timing.

Track four kicks off with dark ambient noise backgrounds, combining noise with winds in a familiar yet skillful and chilling way.  I was a bit nervous about this song due to RYM tagging it a dark folk song, but the way they introduce the song and the sound effect choices they made work perfectly with the darker, sombre tones.  It was the right thing to do to include such a creepy yet somewhat metallic folk track on an album that occasionally played with sound effects and death doom.  And appropriately after the winds have died down, the final track, the title track, slams you with extreme death metal like you're a contestant on Takeshi's Castle.  Right in the face.  When I think about it, going for this type of extreme may have been done before as early as the earliest, but stylistically, it's the proper way to end the album: raw, unhinged, unadulterated extreme metal.  It's the same way Metallica began Ride the Lightning.  This doesn't stop the band from being Blood Incantation.  This song goes into unconventional riffs and repetitive progression in a way that says, "you've seen the weirder side of us.  Now that you know who and what we are, have some traditional death, on the house."

My metal fanboyism considered the possibility that this would be a flawless debut, but I didn't think it was actually going to happen.  It has been a long time since I've had this much fun with a death metal album.  The band masters all the familiar essentials like they're bringing them to the stage for the first time in human history.  Starspawn serves as a focused yet beautifully unhinged reminder that traditional death metal is not dead, and can still be among the best of the best even 40 years after its inception.