Review by Rexorcist for Chasm, The - Deathcult for Eternity: The Triumph (1998)

It shoves the heaviness at you instantly, and with better production values the album is all the more effective. Of course, I wasn't in love with the songwriting at first. The opening Revenge Rises/Drowned in the Mournful Blood, starts out with pretty standard riffing, showing nothing spectacular whatsoever. I hate to sound like a “prog rules all” kind of guy, but the truth is the truth in this instance: once the song kicked into prog metal, it was less predictable and it grabbed my attention. In contrast, I liked the opening riffs to the next song, No Mercy. They were wild and untamed, as were the bandmates as they thrashed through the song, even though it sounded just a little messier than it needed to be at times.

The album's quality of writing would fluxuate for a while as we get songs that are just there for thrashing purposes like I'm the Hateful Raven and songs that are there to focus on the music for artistic purposes like Apocolypse. Highlights for me are when songs get incredibly unpredictable but consistent nonetheless, like A Portal to Nowhere, which was a five-star performance as far as recounting everything the album had done beforehand went.

It's quite obvious that this album was successful among metal fans for its raw brutality. The band went from 6-10 on that scale immediately after the second album, and it switched from pure thrashing to quick-thinking and clever songwriting often. It's a good album for the death metal fan and I recommend it. It's certainly heavy and quirky enough to get the job done, although I've heard a lot of death metal that's impressed me, and I'm not sure this would make top 100 death metal for me. Nevertheless, I'll give it a good rating.

87/100