Review by Rexorcist for Chasm, The - Procession to the Infraworld (2000)
The glory days of The Chasm started with their third album, Deathcult for Eternity: The Triumph, which had its strengths but wasn't the legend it was made out to be by some websites. Maybe the big flaw was that it was too long? Well, with the 40 minute fourth entry, Procession to the Infraworld, I knew that wouldn't be a problem. All that mattered was what it would sound like.
I expected so many different things from this album considering what the band had done in the past and its diverse genre-tagging across the internet. But the first thing I noticed was cleaner production. THAT is a very hit or miss thing in death metal. Why it's true that the most famous death metal album, Symbolic by Death themselves, has some of the cleanest production death metal has ever been granted, I've met lot of death fans who prefer the dirty stuff. So the real question was, can this album justify the production with its heaviness or not? Well, either I just wore THAT ONE right pair of headphones, or the heaviness of this album, while not obsessive like Deathcult, was more than good enough to get by.
The opener, Spectral Sounds of the Mictlan, was really just a good instrumental intro that ran for three minutes and did a good enough job. But the magic began on The Scars of My Journey. The instruments were well-produced and well-played, but I found the vocalist just a little difficult to hear in comparison, so there's that. Already not a perfect album, but satisfactory. The song was heavy as all crap, anyway, and the black metal influence mingled perfectly. The audio problem was fixed on the third track, At the Edge of the Nebula Mortis, which wasn't quite as progressive and used its melody more sparingly, which brought out a lot of the thrash factor. So the first three tracks gradually got better and heavier.
After the third track, the high quality stays consistent, as the riffage displayed is nothing short of incredible, especially in Return of the Banished, which handles its progginess and occasional subgenre-shifting perfectly. Unfortunately, around Architects of Melancholic Apocalypse (I actually typed that title?) you kind of know what to expect by that point, despite the fact that the musicianship is still peak musicianship for death metal. So, even though you don't have anymore surprises, you will likely still have a great time.
The production and musicianship of Procession to the Infraworld beats the previous album by a country mile. But the real reason this is such a treasure is because it handles so many different kinds of metal so well and so lightly that it feels like the band can play multiple genres without even noticing. Among the progressive structures we have traces of melodeath, meloblack and thrash here. This is one of the finest death metal albums I've heard, and I'd recommend this to anyone as a good intro album to death metal since it handles so many kinds with peak consistency.
95/100