If medals were being handed out for services rendered to the death metal cause, John McEntee would be near the front of the queue. Incantation have been flying the flag for remorseless brutality for well over two decades and although other bands have experienced greater commercial success, the East Coast crew have remained hard to beat in terms of preserving their genre’s purity.
Thanks to its wince-inducing production oomph, Vanquished In Vengeance is clearly no exercise in nostalgia, but deathly diehards will surely rejoice at the pulverising rawness and sickening atmosphere that informs these songs. In fact, despite an undeniably sturdy track record, this is as virile and gruesome as McEntee’s mob have sounded since their peerless 1991 debut, Onwards To Golgotha.
If it’s twisted brutality you want then Invoked Infinity and The Hellions Genesis are as warped as they come, but the real macabre money shots arrive when Incantation drop to a snail’s pace on Ascend Into The Eternal and Profound Loathing, seemingly hellbent on summoning Cthulhu himself from the planet’s murky depths with riffs of startlingly bleak malevolence.
