Do you like keyboard-driven, Gothenburg-style melodic death metal that’s catchy as ebola and both beautiful and evil enough to keep a serrated edge on it? Well, if you do, have we got a band for you: Incarnia.

Incarnia is from Montreal, Scandinavia. Okay, maybe Montreal is in Canada (we read that somewhere), but Incarnia’s musical hearts reside in the land of bands like Dark Tranquillity, Insomnium, late-stage Hypocrisy, Mors Principium Est, and (more recently) Zonaria.

My sometimes collaborator IntoTheDarkness urged me to listen to Incarnia’s just released debut album, Proclamation (on Panoptic Records). His tastes and mine don’t always mesh, but man, they sure did this time.

For a young band’s debut release, Proclamation is a remarkably assured, remarkably sophisticated offering of melody-drenched melodeath that also triggers the headbang reflex quite nicely. The more we’ve listened, the more massively hooked we’ve become (more after the jump, including a sample track to hear . . .) Continue reading »