Album Review : Spiritual Poison - Incorporeal (2023)
The music of Ethan Lee McCarthy is one of my favorite discoveries of 2023. He's best known for fronting face crushing doom metal entity Primitive Man, a provider of absurdly heavy and emotional songs that were the soundtrack of my year. MCarthy is somewhat of a renaissance man in extreme music and his new project Spiritual Poison is yet another rebirth for a creative mind that doesn't seem to know how to stop. He released Incorporeal two weeks ago, taking us on a completely different journey again.
McCarthy penned an essay to explain his creative process in regards to this record, which is always welcomed whenever challenging instrumental music is involved. He referred to feelings of peace and weightlessness and labeled Incorporeal classically influenced cinematic drone. I couldn’t have put it better myself because it sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard. My best educated guess would've been something along the lines of orchestral dark ambient, but I’ll take the artist’s word for it.
The opener Summon features echoing orchestral drums and glitchy whispers that do evoke the weightlessness and the greater unknown that Ethan Lee McCarthy was discussing in his essay. These voices eventually turn into chants as the composition reaches its climax, but not like in a Satanic ritual or anything. There’s no impending sense of darkness and threat. Summon just floats between worlds, like a transient soul. It’s minimalistic, but fosters an expansive atmosphere. It feels unmoored to reality.
Tintinnabulum Key is a more dissonant peace that uses feedback and keyboards to create a sense of balance. It betrays more pain than Summon as the feedback dissolves into the thick, rich atmosphere like smoke. It’s being released so that it can cease to be. Passage is an interesting change of pace. It’s a lower frequency piece closer to conventional noise with static-laced percussion and this ever so distant feedback that eventually fades away. It’s the part of the journey where you go through transubstatiation.
The second half of Incorporeal starts with the appropriately titled Place of Peace. It’s carried by thick synths that somehow render the atmosphere of the record richer and more expansive. Higher notes of piano fly by and twinkle in that thick fabric like stars in a dark sky. Along with Summon, this is really one of my favorite tracks on Incorporeal. It's dark, but not in a sad or destructive way. It’s more like, exploring the gap between feeling of hopelessness and enlightenment. It’s about letting go and floating up.
Sheol has a distant storm reverberating percussions raging in the background. It’s powerful, but it’s at a safe enough distance that you can only admire its beauty. It's a very barren piece that finds its footing in Ethan Lee McCarthy’s graceful use of distortion and subtle, glitchy sounds. Incorporeal ends with Return, a piece that really achieves this feeling a crystalline weightlessness he's going for. The weight and pain is still present, but it's at a distance now. It's part of the whole. It's beautiful in its own way.
I really enjoyed this Spiritual Poison record although I’m not sure who outside of drone and ambient music nerds like me will. That’s the cool thing about Ethan Lee McCarthy’s music. It’s unapologetically intuitive and never afraid to be difficult. He's not a musician who offers you answers. He’s more into offering you a canvas through which you can understand yourself. It’s what he did for me with Primitive Man and it’s what he does on Incorporeal. I liked it a lot. This one’s more accessible if you’re willing to work.
