Incantation released the first “single” well preview track of their sure to be mediocre upcoming album, Profane Nexus. “Rites of the Locust” rehashes their past material into an ultra generic death metal song. The actual song sounds like it rehashes a bunch of licks on the already rehashed Vanquish in Vengeance.
If Incantation ran a restaurant this is how their career would’ve gone:
- Bistro Incantation perfectly cooked great food in the early to mid 90s. It slowly declined but was still great and you kept coming back.
- In the late 90s and 2000s, Bistro Incantation switched to serving reheated frozen food as the original chef and every staff member he trained left. You stopped going to Bistro Incantation.
- Bistro Incantation switched to better frozen food from Trader Joe’s on Vanquish in Vengeance and Dirges of Elysium when they were previously serving Lean Cuisine. Idiots ate it all up as a paltry semblance of the original food but normal people of normal body size stuck to real food or the memories of eating it.
- Now it is 2017 and Bristro Incantation got their own line of genitically modified frozen food from an agro-business conglomerate. New fans can pay to eat Bistro Incantation pot-au-feu popsicles or make the original food at home easily by themselves as all of the ingredients it is being rehashed from (Onward to Golgotha through Diabolical Conquest) are readily available.
- Morbidly-obese, neck-pubed hipster gluttons buy everything anyway and eat it all at once as they lack any self-control, dignity, or masculinity.
Tags: boring, death metal, incantation, mainstream metal, new track, rehash, relapse, relapse records, selling out, upcoming release
It sounds like it’s trying to be an “underground” sounding version of more commercial death metal. A simple “groovy” riff like Convulse next to long directionless tremolo picked nonsense that reminds me more of Cannibal Corpse’s Gallery of Suicide than anything else. Sadly, Incantation have been like this for a while. Weak.
This is not »mediocre«, this complete, utter trash. Sounds like “death metal guitar antics” transposed into some major scale (or something similar whose ‘general’ sound is in the ‘upbeat and happy’ range) and with a guitar sound close to distortion as used in hard rock. Instead of real tempo changes, the drums play slower or faster in some ‘random’ (read: no discernible purpose) fashion.
The ‘fastfood’ analogy is apt: This is Totally Genuine Death Metal[™] for the microwave.
I agree with your conclusion, but for different reasons.
1. On the surface, they do well for their audience: the vocals are solid and the production is good. The guitar sound struck me as good but just a tad downmixed which fits with your observation that this is designed more for a mainstream audience.
2. The individual riffs seem competent, which again is all their audience demands, but they are derived from past song and riff patterns used by this band, and then there is the bizarre happy major key processional riff that you note. Might help reach a wider audience. The random drumming is interesting in that they play straight death metal, but then add some off-time internal commentary, sort of like techno or rock trying to build intensity for the dive into the chorus.
3. Most importantly, the song is artistically incoherent. It means nothing; there is no topic, no journey, no poetic realization and no adventure undergone. As a result, it seems entirely superficial.
4. While there is nothing particularly “wrong” with this song, on the detail level there are injections of discontinuity, and on the widest scale, it has lost what made death metal relevant.
Sad to see. Maybe they will read this commentary and realize that there are people out here who still value real music. Then again, perhaps we are too few and the smartest move is to rehash the past in more digestible form for a new audience who not only cannot tell the difference, but will be put off by the complexity and existential terror conveyed in the original.
As usual, the problem is not the politicians (bands, labels, magazines) but the voters (buyers).
I will say it caught me off guard that they are incorporating more heavy/speed metal elements this time around instead of being more “atmospheric”. At least they’re trying to vary up their old man catalog.
P.S. you misspelled “bowdlerize” as “bowdlerLize”. Sad!