专辑简介

by Eduardo Rivadavia

Following up an album as potent and distinctive as 2000's Procession to the Underworld was never going to be an easy task, but the Chasm's just as cryptically named 2002 opus Conjuration of the Spectral Empire, even more than suffering from a something of a been-there-done-that identity crisis, was truly undone by its horrible production. Hey, all due credit to the enduring Mexican death metal favorites for even managing to record and finance the album on their own, but with their reliably challenging songwriting mostly lost in a low-fidelity fog, the best you can do here is revert to the less-is-more mentality sometimes applicable to primitive death metal. Only there's nothing primitive about the Chasm's sophisticated arrangements, which remain the focus of these often extensive (some might say interminable) new compositions. "Deathcult Arrival" is the band's traditional instrumental opener, but buried as it is under substandard production, seems to drag on about four-minutes longer than necessary -- as do ensuing, elaborately named epics "Brand the Mournful Liberation" and (catch your breath now) "Traveling Through Chaos (I, The Pathfinder II)" -- some might say. Even unquestionably higher caliber creations like "The Conjuration" and "The Ecstasy of Pain & Destruction" barely make it through and, for once on a Chasm album, one is actually relieved when a pair of straightforward and mercifully short songs -- the pure thrashing "Reveal the Truth" and the quietly ambient, but still impractically titled "A Soulstorm Bleeds Over the Horizon" -- finally simplify things a bit. Then it's back to yet another gigantic enterprise (the nine-minute, instrumental title cut of their previous album) to wrap up proceedings, but you get the picture: Conjuration of the Spectral Empire proved it's possible for art to succumb to lousy technology.