The Relentless Barrage of INCANTATION’s “Sect of Vile Divinities”
Not many bands can say that they’ve kept the same steam through lineup changes and a three-decade career that involved catalyzing an entire genre. INCANTATION, part of the group of forerunners who helped ignite death metal in New York City, is one of those bands. On their latest release, Sect of Vile Divinities, the veteran crew led by lone founding member John McEntee deliver the furious, doomy, and frankly a little disgusting brutality that has been their calling card for longer than I’ve been alive.
For most of its 46-minute running time, Sect of Vile Divinities pummels the listener with salvos of tremolo-picked riffs, relentless blastbeats, and guttural invocations of the occult that fans will no-doubt expect from the band. This barrage is broken up by lumbering explorations into the depths of crushing sludge, sinister harmonized passages, and wailing lead guitars that echo like screams throughout a subterranean city. Thanks to crisp and modern production, each of these elements is allowed to breathe without being simplified into a low-fi white noise, while elements like the guitar tone retain an earthy, warm tone.
Longtime drummer Kyle Severn delivers ferocious blastbeats as well as earth-shaking groove passages, while stalwart bassist Chuck Sherwood grounds the compositions in growling basslines. McEntee and fellow guitarist Sonny Lombardozzi (since replaced in the lineup by Luke Shively) truly shine in their deft rhythm playing and haunting harmonized leads. Driven forward by McEntee’s cavernous and varied vocal delivery, this is a perfectly unsettling album for when life in 2020 feels most like a dizzying trudge through the bowels of a horror movie, which, let’s face it, is often.
If I could level one critique at this release, it’s that at times it can feel like one chaotic song as opposed to a collection of individual pieces. Riffs are introduced, never to be revisited; plodding sections of slow grooves intersect with speedier passages at near right angles; and, of course, there aren’t exactly “hooks” to anchor the songs to a particular structure or bookends. But I can recognize this fully as the metalcore kid in my DNA searching for one of those aspects of familiarity to latch onto, and what is life but not the pursuit of things that challenge and surprise?
Fans of Incantation and their ilk are sure to be satisfied with standout tracks like leviathan “Propitation,” the spiraling madness of “Chant of Formless Dread,” and the powerful closing suite made of up “Unborn Ambrosia,” “Fury’s Manifesto,” and “Siege Hive.”
Listen to Incantation’s full album stream below:
