#tech-death

I’ve spoken about death-doom a few times here, which is the sub-sub-genre of death metal that has a doom metal influence within it, so the riffs are more prominent, and the overall tone is a bit slower, more meandering, and slow-moving. That’ll work wonders for you if you love doom metal, or slower-paced metal, or you’ll hate it, especially if you want brutal, fast, and energetic stuff. I mean, I’m on the fence about that, because I don’t mind doom metal at all, but I love death metal, and I love how energetic and chaotic it is, so the idea of doom metal being integrated has always been odd. I’ve listened to a few albums with a death-doom sound to it, the most recent being the newest album from Hooded Menace, Ossuarium Silhouettes Unhallowed, and they were pretty cool. I didn’t love that album, specifically, because it was a bit too slow-moving for my tastes, but at the same time, it’s cool to hear that combination. What I wanted, at least from death-doom, is I wanted a good balance between the death and the doom. That’s where New York-based band Incantation comes into play, because I picked up their debut LP, 1992’s Onward To Golgotha, a long while ago, but I haven’t talked about it until now. I picked it up late last year, but I never got a chance to get into it, because I got a lot of other stuff at the time, so I decided to wait to review it. I might have talked about it, but I don’t remember if I did, honestly. I wanted to talk about it now, just because I’ve been listening to this album a bit more, since I’ve been getting back into 90s death metal, and I have to say that I really like it. This is a good example of a death-doom album that works really well for me. Incantation is one of the forefathers of death-doom, along with Obituary and Amorphis, but Incantation is also one of the oldest death metal bands.

Despite their debut LP coming out in 1992, they’ve been around since 1989. Next year will mark thirty years for them as a band, and they’re still around today. They released their last album just a year ago, I believe, so that’s awesome. When I first heard Onward To Golgotha, I wasn’t too crazy about it, because it was a bit slow-moving for my tastes, but getting more into doom metal during December of last year, give or take, I found an appreciation for it. One that I didn’t have beforehand, anyway, so I was able to get into that stuff a bit more. I’m still not a super huge fan of doom, but that’s just because I like more energy in my music, especially when doom metal albums are around an hour a piece, so that can feel very exhausting. I like my doom metal short, sweet, and to the point, even though that’s not what a lot of doom metal does. Regardless, listening to Onward To Golgotha again has been a great experience, because this album gets that balance right. This album is both brutal but slow-moving at the same time. It’s not that it leans on either sound, at least in the sense of being more doom than death, because Hooded Menace was more of a doom metal band, but Incantation is definitely a death metal band. I can’t say that they’re a death metal band with some doom metal elements, though. I mean, if you want to label them as basic as possible, yeah, they’re a death metal band, but if you wanted to be more specific, I’d go with death-doom. They put effort into both sounds and aspects of their sound, so it works quite well, frankly. This album’s a little long, at around 45 minutes, but the album never becomes too “doom-y,” I guess you could say, where the riffs feel very stagnant or boring, and the album never becomes a monotonous 90s death metal album, either, so there’s a great middle ground here that the band very much exhibits nicely.