INCUBUS (LA) — Beyond the Unknown (review)

INCUBUS (LA) — Beyond the Unknown album cover Album · 1990 · Death Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
UMUR
"Beyond the Unknown" is the 2nd full-length studio album by US death/thrash metal act Incubus. The album was released through Nuclear Blast Records in 1990. All instruments and vocals were recorded by the Howard brothers, Moyes M. Howard (drums) and Francis M. Howard (vocals, bass, guitars), at Morrisound Recordings in Tampa, Florida in June 1990. In 1999 the band were forced to change their name to Opprobrium because of the California-based alternative rock band, who held the rights to the Incubus monicker. The band never achieved the kind of success under their new monicker as they had while they were called Incubus, and they´ve sort of disappeared since then, so it´s not necessarily known by fans of the genre how huge a release "Beyond the Unknown" actually was back in 1990. Their debut full-length studio album "Serpent Temptation (1988)" didn´t provide the band with much success or recognition, but "Beyond the Unknown" changed that and put Incubus firmly on the death/thrash metal map. At least for a couple of years.

The music on the album is aggressive death/thrash metal not completely unlike the music style on "Beneath the Remains (1989)" by Sepultura and maybe with a few nods towards mid- to late eighties Slayer. The playing is organic and not always perfect, but charming nonetheless. There are both fast paced thrashy riffing and heavier riff sections in the music as well as several screaming guitar solos. Francis M. Howard has a powerful raw and fiercely aggressive vocal delivery, which is one of the greatest assets of the album.

The 8 tracks on the 38:52 minutes long album are generally of a good quality and tracks like "Massacre of the Unborn", "Certain Accuracy" and especially "Curs of the Damned Cities" even touch excellent territory. It´s not all great though and some shifts between sections don´t flow as well as they could have, and as mentioned the playing isn´t always as tight as it could have been either. The fact that the pronounciation of some of the words in the tracks sound like Francis M. Howard doesn´t speak English that well and the fact that he often stumbles over the words because the lyrics are too long for the vocal lines are also issues that drag my rating down a bit. So it should speak volumes about the quality of the great things on the album, that I still rate "Beyond the Unknown" with a 3.5 star (70%) rating. This might be a flawed release, but it´s still greatly enjoyable.
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