Album Review: Incantation – Sect Of Vile Divinities

Out of all of America’s early-‘90s death metal gang, Incantation were the best. Even now, three decades and change in, their dedication to and obsession with this stuff has kept them creatively match fit, and their signature atmosphere of haunting evil chokingly thick.

Sect Of Vile Divinities is awash, as ever, with surging death metal fury and doomy heaviness that squelches and splats in between the blasting. Take Propitation, which races along on a barbaric riff, before dropping a dirge that could have come from Brit doom masters Cathedral’s Forest Of Equilibrium. Whether fast or slow, though, mainman John McEntee’s well of riffs is in no danger of running dry, and the fury he conjures up on Chant Of Formless Dread and Black Fathoms Fire are some of the most overpowering and crushing in Incantation’s arsenal. There’s absolutely no fucking about with any of it, just excellent, expert death metal riffs so sturdy you could build a house (or a morgue) with them.

Incantation may now be both old school and, indeed, just plain old, but Sect Of Vile divinities is a razor-sharp exercise in what death metal should be all about. Morbid rather than moribund, sludgy rather than sluggish, it’s the work of expert craftsmen whose fanatical devotion to death means they are never anything less than dark, dirty and brutal. Once again, Incantation are fucking brilliant.

Verdict: 4/5

For Fans Of: Cannibal Corpse, Disembowelment, Gatecreeper

Sect Of Vile Divinities is out now via Relapse.