Absolute Elsewhere

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Absolute Elsewhere is the third full-length album by Denver progressive death metal band Blood Incantation, released in 2024 on Century Media and framed as a culmination of everyth ing they have done to that point. The record runs about 44 minutes and is structured into two large suites, “The Stargate” and “The Message,” each subdivided into three “tablets,” so six tracks function as interconnected movements rather than standalone songs. Musically, it fuses the band’s cosmic death-metal foundation with 1970s progressive rock, kosmische electronics, ambient passages, and new age–like chanting, mixing Morbid Angel–style heaviness with influences from Yes, Pink Floyd, and obscure space-prog like In Search of Ancient Gods.Thematically, Absolute Elsewhere deepens Blood Incantation’s longstanding fascination with consciousness, time, and extraterrestrial or cosmic perspectives. The first half explores the transience of individual life, the inevitability of death, and the idea that philosophical ideas or abstract consciousness can outlast any single organism, using shifts between crushing riffs, spectral keyboards, and spoken-word sections to suggest movement across alien landscapes and different planes of existence. The second half pivots to a blunt central question—what does it mean to be human?—and urges listeners, through its lyrics, to “awaken their souls,” recognize their place in a larger dance of time, and sow peace and generosity rather than succumbing to purely animal instincts. Across both suites, the album’s production and writing balance accessibility and complexity: riffs are slightly less tangled than on A Hidden History of the Human Race, but the overall architecture is more symbolically and structurally ambitious, making Absolute Elsewhere feel like a single, coherent voyage through progressive cosmic death metal rather than just a collection of tracks. Show more