This is more like it; a proper single, an attempt by a band to top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and all ports West. A nice commercial 12″ single bearing a sticker that bore the reassuringly old-school legend ‘12″ Maxi Single’. Surely appearances on Top Of The Pops and children’s Saturday morning TV are only a matter of days away!
Well, if the band in question weren’t my absolute favourite death-space-prog-metal band Blood Incantation and the lead-off track on the single maybe had a teensy-weensy snappier name than ‘Obliquity Of The Ecliptic’*. Ah well, Luminescent Bridge might not be the enormous Europop hit of my, fever-ridden, dreams then.
Luminescent Bridge is a quite brilliant pointer to the twin poles of Blood Incantation’s sound and their almost-too-massive-to-fully-grok 2024 LP Absolute Elsewhere.
There are two tracks and 18 minutes of music here. The A-side ‘Obliquity Of The Ecliptic’ begins in a suitably spacey manner before accelerating away on the crest of Isaac Faulk’s drums and Riedl and Kolontorsky’s riffing. All so great, so metal but once Riedl starts singing we cross the divide that so many folks baulk at**. Those distorted, growling, cookie monstering vocals that in a lot of ways demarcate death metal from just very VERY heavy metal.
In true psych prog form, the music thrashes around like a hooked eel, different sections and time signatures changing and reversing on the head of a pin. Then at 3:30^ we shift fully into the realms of interstellar darkness, the drums persist but all the music swells and becomes grandiose, elegiac even to the sound of twin guitars. It is a great example of just how perfect, poised and powerful Blood Incantation are.
The title track of Luminescent Bridge is an evocative, questing guitar-led ambient work. This harks back to 2022’s Tangerine Dream channelling^^ Timewave Zero; which incidentally is the best and possibly most played LP I have discovered this year. This is not just a metal band dabbling in other genres, Paul Riedl has cut a number of ambient/instrumental krautrock-style albums separately to the band and it really shows.
‘Luminescent Bridge’ is 9:39 of bliss that recalls Steve Hillage as much as it does elements of Floyd or TG themselves. It has a real ecstatic tone to it and is technical without feeling remotely clinical in execution. It is worth saying that Blood Incantation do not have that whole hashtronaut vibe about them which, much as I do dig that, can get cliched fast.
I heartily commend Luminescent Bridge to you, the record buying public and warn you that I will henceforth regularly bore you about Blood Incantation as often as I can get away with doing. They excite me in a way that not many bands do at the moment, moreover they have challenged and pushed my tastes a bit, which is nice to experience at my advanced age.
Still need a snappier title though fellas.
1253 Down.
*come on guys, how about calling it ‘Relax’, or ‘Holiday’, or ‘Believe’? no, well you may as well have gone for my initial suggestion ‘Obscelescing The Grandiloquensia’ then.
**myself too until relatively recently.
^only 3:30, we have had roughly 7 songs worth of inventiveness and thrust in this time.
^^members of TG guest on Absolute Elsewhere.
