The Chasm - Procession To The Infraworld

(12 Mar 2011)

One interesting thing about Death Metal is just the devotion you need to give to an album of the genre to understand it, let alone truly like it. It's a kind of music in which you'll usually have to painstakingly analyze and reanalyze a song before you can appreciate it. On the one hand, it can be really frustrating when you just want a quick fix of music, but it's also quite rewarding in the end, when you already know a great song and still manage to discover new details every listen. It's a virtually neverending learning process and a challenging genre for both the musicians and the listeners. Speaking of challenging, here we have Procession To The Infraworld.

The overall sound of the album is like a more progressive, humble and subtle Close to a World Below (although it's probably more like the other way around, since this album is a year older). The guitars here would seem like a fairly uninteresting take on minor chords and arpeggios, until a more attentive listen proves the riffs to have some very interesting touches. These interesting touches, consequentially, give the album and the songs an atmosphere of isolation and darkness. As for the drumming, it's equally subtly creative.

The album starts fairly mild, becoming progressively more intense throughout the first three tracks, and spends the rest of the time being mostly mid-paced. My main problem with it is three songs: "At The Edge of The Nebula Mortis", "Fading..." and "Architects of Melancholic Apocalypse". No matter how many times I listen to them, I still end up feeling quite indifferent about them as songs. Some of their parts are very good, but the songs either make no sense structurally, or just have absolutely no element of surprise to them, I can't tell. They're like most classical music: enjoyable as the pleasant combination of sounds that it is, but nothing other than that.

In the end, I like Procession to the Infraworld, and, despite the frustrating wall of a learning curve, it is rewarding to enjoy it at least a bit. I can also understand why so many people love this release so much. Nevertheless, it's just a type of music I can't appreciate to the fullest.

Standout tracks:

Return Of The Banished
Cosmic Landscapes Of Sorrow
Storm Of Revelations