Review: BLOOD INCANTATION and SECRET CHIEFS 3 - Live in Brisbane
What Did We Just Watch???
Wednesday 5th November 2025
Written by Tom Wilson
Photographed by: Rashid AlKamraikhi
It’s been two days now, and I still haven’t come to terms with what I’ve just witnessed, even when standing in the gym wearing my new BLOOD INCANTATION singlet, shaking my head and smiling. If you can indulge me for a few sentences, I’d like to tell you why I might be having a hard time processing this show.
I’m prescribed antidepressants due to army service and the neurological spiciness that often comes with it, and when you change meds, often they’ll make you wait for three days before starting a new one. That means that there is one night, right before you start the new meds, where you are incredibly vulnerable … and I happened to be trusting myself with BLOOD INCANTATION and SECRET CHIEFS 3 for the evening, with only a haze of cannabis vapour as protection. Now that the stage is set, let’s talk about what happened at the Triffid on that lovely Wednesday night. Amazing things can happen when people don’t want to share their toys. Drummers in headlining bands often aren’t thrilled to have other people messing with their kits, so having a second drum kit set up on the stage is nothing unusual, but tonight’s tightly-packed stage means that we get to see this stunning SECRET CHIEFS lineup in profile, each member equidistant and poised in their own way, with even their drummer set up side-on to the crowd, giving the audience amazing access to watch his craft (or just stare at his feet, you know how drumming fans can get).
Image: SECRET CHIEFS 3
Image: SECRET CHIEFS 3
Image: SECRET CHIEFS 3
Image: SECRET CHIEFS 3
I can bullshit with the best of them, but SECRET CHIEFS 3 left me genuinely speechless. I only recently started exploring Trey Spruance’s material and was hearing most of these compositions for the first time, and being instrumentals free of the restraints of lyrics, verses or conventional song structure, each performance felt like a classical music exhibition. The drum kit is the only thing mic’d up onstage. They let the music do the talking, literally, and pardon the cliché, but it spoke volumes. Someday I’ll know enough about music to understand everything that they were saying!
Image: SECRET CHIEFS 3
The lights go down, the synths go up, and we get ready to embrace the insanity of BLOOD INCANTATION … so we wait … and wait … bloody hell this synth is going forever … there they are! They finally emerge onstage and plunge into their new album Absolute Elsewhere, and there is nowhere I’d rather be than right here. Tonight sounds amazing, and whoever was twiddling the knobs at Triffid that night deserves a medal. They take us through the new album, an epic, winding journey through progressive rock and crushing death metal. For the uninitiated, imagine if DETHKLOK wanted to (cue Nathan Explosion voice) make “brutal metal but, like, for smart people or something.” The ideas are vast, the textures are magnificent, and the musicianship is top notch. BLOOD INCANTATION have a gong, because of course they do. All bands should have gongs. If you don’t have a gong, why don’t you have a gong? You should get one. Anyway, said BLOOD INCANTATION gong is used judiciously, and drumming fans in the pit are cheering at Isaac Faulk’s antics behind the kit. Singer/guitarist Paul Riedl uses a reverb trigger to punctuate his sentences with suitably grandiose echoes, illustrating both a penchant for the dramatic and impressive comic timing. He asks a member of the audience to mime flipping the record over, and takes a second to chastise him for forgetting to mime the stylus, a mistake I am confident he will not make in future. The mood onstage with the Denver lads is light hearted, but the music is played dead serious, and by the time they bring the night to a close, I am rubbing my temples thinking how am I ever going to express tonight?
Image: BLOOD INCANTATION
Image: BLOOD INCANTATION
Image: BLOOD INCANTATION
Image: BLOOD INCANTATION
Well, how did I do? The truth is, I can’t adequately express what I saw from a musicianship perspective because I’m not a musician, but I can tell you this: this was the perfect gig at the perfect time, and I can’t believe I get to do shit like this every week. Life is good.
Image: BLOOD INCANTATION
Photos by: Rashid AlKamraikhi
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