Album Review : Blood Incantation - Timewave Zero (2022)
There is an unwritten rule in metal that you can only explore different sounds through side projects. That, let’s say, if you started playing death metal in 1991 under the name FuckPigs, you’re only allowed to play death metal under the name FuckPigs for your entire career unless you start a different band. If you dare change, you will be called a poser and a sellout. I know, it’s a stupid rule and I’m glad bands aren’t respecting it.
Blood Incantation released a dark ambient EP called Timewave Zero last month and it’s both getting unfairly praised and destroyed at the same time because people have no fucking nuance.
Timewave Zero is a forty minutes record featuring two classical compositions of roughly equal lengths: Io and Ea. I know Blood Incantation is primarily a death metal band, but such a trippy project didn’t come out of nowhere. They were always interested in space themes and forward thinking, progressive sounds. In that sense, Timewave Zero isn’t an Ulver-like sonic overhaul or an attempt to sellout. Blood Incantation’s dark ambient is as low-key and experimental as it gets. It’s also a pause from the brutal stuff.
The first composition Io is the most abstract and experimental. Named after a satellite of Jupiter with over 400 known volcanoes on it, the composition consists in layers of heavy and obsessive synths that repeat melodies like cosmic mantras. The shift and interplay in layers is more discreet than on Ea, giving an expansive feeling to the music. Some sounds feel really close by, other feel extremely distant. Io conveys a feeling of monolithic lifelessness. Of the natural world existing unobserved.
Ea is different. Also deployed over four movements, it’s quite busier and feels more familiar. It features the same patterns of obsessive repetition, but the melodies are more accessible and sometimes includes different instrumentation. At the start of the third movement, Morris Kolotyrsky can be heard playing in distance a couple melancholic chords on acoustic guitar. A detail perhaps, but it creates one of the most gorgeous contrast on the record next to the relentlessly sad synth melody.
That leaves us with two questions. First: Is Timewave Zero good? I guess you’d have to be a huge progressive synth nut or Blood Incantation’s greatest fan in order to call it a masterpiece, but it’s solid dark ambient. It enforces a meditative, trance-like mood on focused listeners. It fucks with concepts of distance and proximity through the density of sound and this is pretty fucking cool if you ask me. Nerdy and weird, but it hits you both on a cerebral level and, in a roundabout way, on a visceral level too.
Second question is: why the hell did Blood Incantation stray from their beloved brand of technical death metal to go in this direction? The band claims that Timewave Zero is just "music they wanted to hear", but the truth lies in a slightly more complex place. Spacey, dark ambient music fits in their creative paradigm absurdly well. Every melody on Timewave Zero could’ve been intros or bridging part of some of their death metal material. The guys just said "fuck it" and committed themselves to the full thing.
Timewave Zero is solid dark ambient without being revolutionary, but its appeal doesn’t lie there. A project like this enables metal musicians to pursue creative vision over a longing for technical mastery that narrows the possibilities for expression. In a sense, it will be very much an Ulver-like sonic overhaul if they keep expanded in different directions and all the better if they keep doing death metal at the same time. You’re not selling out if you’re doing something different.
You’re only selling out if your new direction is opportunistic and derivative, and this is anything but.
