Music

Death metal glories in ugliness—rhythm guitars the texture of churned shit, leads like pig squeals, vocals like reverse peristalsis. But Blood Incantation do beautiful things with that ugliness. Their ugliness moves; within 40 minutes on their second album Hidden History of the Human Race, the Denver quartet brings death metal to exalted places, places it hardly ever goes, without ever losing the essential, foul tang of the sound. It helps that they are incredible players, virtuosic in the most basic sense. In just the first few minutes of the opening epic “Slave Species of the Gods,” guitarists Paul Riedl and Morris Kolontyrsky evoke the cold steel-shavings scrape of Slayer’s Kerry King and the hair-flip theatrics of Metallica’s Kirk Hammett. But their virtuosity comes from their vocabula...

Jeff Parker always writes parts that sound unassuming at first listen and unavoidable by the fifth. It’s the X-factor that the guitarist and master collaborator has brought to every project on his long and still-growing list of projects, jazz or rock or otherwise: Tortoise, Isotope 217, the recently reunited Chicago Underground Quartet, his solo work as a bandleader, his work as a soloist, and his supporting contributions for countless others. Despite his ability to do backflips with a guitar, his best-known lick from Tortoise’s 1998 song “TNT” is more like a heel-click—an easy, humble gesture, perfectly timed and placed. It’s a preternatural thing, of course, but it’s also a skill that he’s cultivated by changing up his scenery and embracing the unfamiliar. A few years ago, while splittin...