It seems that over the last decade the subgenre of technical/progressive death metal has become quite a trend in the metal scene, and has grown tremendously in popularity among metal fans too. The Swedish Spawn of Possession are one of the most prominent technical death metal bands, and have made a name for themselves for bringing a lot of classical music influence into their brand of brutal and hyper-fast death metal. Their debut album “Cabinet” was released in 2003, followed by their sophomore album “Noctambulant” in 2006, both of them being critically acclaimed and well received by fans of the genre. Since then the band has been completely absent, and now after six years the bands long anticipated third release, “Incurso”, is finally out.
Now for the bands standards, this album is as good as the previous ones and in some ways it actually surpasses them, but as with the two previous albums of Spawn of Possession, as well as with all other releases by modern technical death metal bands, “Incurso” is too complex and technical for its own good, and is bound to appeal only to fans of this certain style of death metal. Every track in this album is expertly composed and executed, and displays the bands jaw dropping abilities to the maximum, but ultimately comes off as completely forgettable. There are so many different riffs and tempo changes on each song that the listener loses his focus and becomes lost, and the melodies are played at such ridiculous speeds that they end up sounding as a series of random noises. Even when a catchy riff pops up, it doesn’t stay around for long. Though the album opener “Where Angels Go Demons Follow” (excluding the intro track “Abodement”) does contain some catchy riffs and interesting neo-classical melodies that will surely attract the attention of the listener, by the time the album reaches the middle, one gets the feeling that he has been listening the same song over and over again. There is absolutely nothing to distinguish the songs from each other, with the only exception being the final track, “Apparition”, which contains a fair amount of symphonic backdrop, as well as some more melodic guitar lines, thus being the definite highlight of the album.
The production is also not the best either. While it’s crystal clear and every instrument is perfectly distinguishable, it is so polished and processed that it loses all the rough edge and heaviness that a proper death metal release should have. The guitars especially do not possess any bass or crunch at all, and the drums are triggered too much also. All of these make the band sound inoffensive and restrained, making one think that they have a complete lack of passion, which is a shame really as they have clearly put a lot of effort into this.
All the above might lead to the conclusion that this album is a complete failure, but it actually isn’t. It is clearly subjective weather one will like this album or not. For technical death metal standards this is a very solid and respectable release, but beyond that it is not something that will be widely appreciated. In other words, “Incurso” will surely be appreciated by fans of Spawn of Possession and fans of technical death metal in general, and was surely worth the wait for them, but the rest of extreme metal fans likely won’t find anything that will particularly amuse them here. But of course, one should let his own ears be the judge of this.