Problems aside, the title track belches enough raw sulfur and slime to make you a believer, promising a pornucopia of hellish delights, while “Crown of Decayed Salvation” and “His Weak Hand” fuck your shit up good and proper. ![]() Lineup and label shuffles and other various internal and external pressures were at play at this stage of the band’s career and the resulting material ended up inconsistent and the back half of Blasphemy is quite shakey (we won’t discuss the 23-minute ambient closing outro). The troubled child of the Incantation catalog, it should be a comfort to the band knowing that even at their worst they still end up with a pretty solid death metal album with a few killer cuts. Incantation are true pioneers who placed the stamp of hideous filth on death forevermore. In the process, they’ve crafted one of the most respectably consistent catalogs in the history of metal. Over their 30-plus year career, they’ve experienced an almost comical amount of hardships with endless lineup shuffles but through it all they’ve churned out a stellar collection of groundbreaking, genre-defining classics. Expertly merging thrashing insanity with ridiculously heavy doom, the sound forged by this legendary act launched a million imitators while creating the whole “cavern-core” aesthetic. In the world of death metal, the name Incantation casts a large shadow. So mutter a quick hex, down-tune any string instruments you have to hand, and join us for a tour of one of the best fucking catalogs on this or any other plane of existence. You may argue with some of their choices–seriously, please argue with some of their choices-but even then, it’s a cogently-argued sort of wrongheadedness. I’m glad I bowed out–the trio of esteemed staffers below each makes sense of Incantation’s oeuvre in compelling fashion. Ferox intended to participate, but ultimately ceded the field when a murderer’s row of writing talent answered the Ranking call. ![]() It’s a big old job, and the task of ranking their output is both daunting and a true labor of love. Incantation spawned a vast and consistently remarkable body of work that you can begin to understand by breaking it down into “early,” “middle,” and “current” eras. With the act’s twelfth slab Unholy Deification set to drop this week, Incantation remains a vital force some thirty-four years after writing their first riff. John McEntee’s creation has endured its share of lineup shuffling and behind-the-scenes agita, but Incantation’s patented recipe of furious death metal fused with menacing doom passages reliably delivers extreme metal excellence. ![]() The band’s birth cries can be heard on a little album called Onward to Golgotha, and with that debut they set a death metal standard that has been widely imitated but seldom equaled. Incantation took no baby steps, spent no time fumbling for a sound or a mission. But what if, once in a while, the collective paused to take stock and consider the discography of those bands that shaped many a taste? What if two three aspects of the AMG collective personality shared with the slavering masses their personal rankings of that discography and what if the rest of the personality used a Google sheet some kind of dark magic to produce an official guide to, and all-around definitive aggregated ranking of, that band’s entire discography? Well, if that happened, we imagine it would look something like this… The reviewing collective at AMG lurches from one new release to the next, errors and nOObs strewn in our wake. ![]() The life of the unpaid, overworked metal reviewer is not an easy one.
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