Photo of Blood Incantation by Zach K. Johnson
w/ Krallice
Just over one week ago, I had the good fortune to watch the Back to the Beginning pay-per-view at a friend’s house, along with innumerable Ozzy fans worldwide. I caught the livestream of the latter five-hour stretch and caught up on the rest in the days that followed. Most of the performances were incredible, and it put a really fine point on the influence Black Sabbath had on the music world. Since then, I’ve continued to dig into the catalogs of so many bands—new and old—who were featured or referenced in the epic celebration of a legend. Sabbath’s impact on the music world cannot be overstated.
It seems only fitting that I spent the final night of Ozzy’s life enjoying a spectacular display of the doors that Black Sabbath opened and the imaginations their music piqued.
To the untrained ear, Krallice and Blood Incantation have a similar sound. To the metal connoisseur, the former is a black metal band while the latter is of the death metal variety. I heard several times that the former was “not my preferred style” of metal, “but they were entertaining,” nonetheless. My moderately informed opinion found both acts on the experimental and progressive end of metal, which is the important feature for me. With the two sub-genres representing, it was a night of growling vocals, spidery fingerwork, rapid-fire drums, twitchy time signatures, and eerie keys. I like to think the Prince of Darkness had already begun his transcendence of the confines of space and time and was with us in spirit that night.
Krallice executed intricate compositions with Swiss-made precision. The guitarist, bassist, and drummer/synth player took turns at roaring vocals, most often coming back to guitarist Mick Barr. The interplay of guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard/percussion with Swiss watch timing and whiplash time signatures kept me delightedly on the edge of my proverbial seat. The bass was so heavy—How heavy was it?—the bass was so heavy I could feel it in my sinuses. It felt like involuntarily flaring my nostrils from a starting point somewhere down in my vocal cords. I don’t know how people do it without earplugs (or how I did it myself back in the day), because the depth of sound caused mine to resonate in their canals. Though the melody developed slowly, this was often undergirded by frenetic percussion—the central drummer, Lev Weinstein, delivered fantastically convoluted runs that drummer/synth player Colin Marston accented with bell and China-type cymbals before switching back to his “Mr. Crowley”-intro-affected keyboards.
I watched the setup for Blood Incantation with fascination, as the crew wore substantial hooded black jackets in the 95-degree St. Louis heat. Thank goodness that was just for the Gregorian suspense. The band reappeared in muscle shirts and three-quarter length sleeves under vests, with stationary fans blowing haphazardly long hair to swirl around exaggerated mustaches and sideburns. The obelisks that patiently waited at the sides of the stage lit from within, illuminating the carved red glyphs with a red glow.
The band launched into their latest release, Absolute Elsewhere, and paused only briefly between songs to drop some music trivia on us before launching into the next track on the album. True to the prog-rock nature that drives the standard Blood Incantation song structure, intense periods of jack-hammer double-bass and carpal tunnel-inducing shredding were broken up with long, dramatic stretches of sonic scenery-building, the melody evolving every so subtly with each repetition of a line. Guitarist and vocalist Paul Riedl has described the vision for Absolute Elsewhere as “like the soundtrack to a Herzog-style Sci-Fi epic about the history of/battle for human consciousness itself, via a ’70s Prog album played by a ’90s Death Metal band from the future,” and the visual effects as well as the journey through tempos and moods made this a successful translation from concept to composition. A spotlight at the back of the stage occasionally projected onto the walls of Delmar Hall a dissociated piece of an instrument—such as the head of a guitar—further enhancing the cinematic feel.
A few songs in, Riedl engaged an audience member, presumably one clutching their copy of the vinyl with a request: “Well, that concludes Side One. If you—right there—could please flip the record over for us?” They subsequently delivered the remaining tracks to complete the album’s story, the crowded floor a sea of shaggy heads bobbing like metronomes in sync with some piece of the rhythm. There was some pit action, and a few brave revelers attempted crowd surfing until one unfortunate soul found out the hard way why venues hate it—he sailed over the rail head-down and feet-in-the-air, only to emerge a few moments with a dazed look in his eyes and a bloody towel pressed to the back of his head. Otherwise, the audience seemed content to hang on every perfectly executed note of Absolute Elsewhere’s complex and evocative construction. “The Message [Tablet II]” gave everyone a breather with its Floyd-like trippy echoes and existential musings before embarking upon the gloriously brutal closer, “The Message [Tablet III].”
Following the album’s end, we were treated to a few more odds-and-ends, always introduced by way of fun facts –
Q: This next song comes from an album with an alien on the cover.
A: “The Giza Power Plant”
Q: Can anyone guess which song was actually intended to be the fifth track on a different album?
A: “The Vth Tablet (Of Enûma Eliš)”
After a solid 90 minutes or so of Isaac Faulk’s scorching drums, Morris Kolontyrsky’s maniacally whining guitars, Riedl’s commanding growls, and Jeff Barrett’s fluid basslines, Blood Incantation brought us home with their final space horror theme, “Obliquity of the Ecliptic,” from the 2023 EP Luminescent Bridge. Minds sufficiently blown, we slowly filed out with the rapt daze of a proper metal night walloping, minus the violent landing.
In sum, hot take is that with their respective technical exactitude and conceptual storytelling, Krallice resonates with the nerds and Blood Incantation speaks to the geeks, though both satisfy discerning music fans with a proclivity for otherworldly metal. The mark of Ozzy is indelible, and the world is a cooler place for the continuing legacy that these two bands built upon it. | Courtney Dowdall
