Chasma United States

"Dark, raw, bleak, oppressive and yet strangely epic, "Declarations of the Great Artificer" contains a mere three songs, which in turn have an average length of around 10 minutes. We are dealing with dark black metal here with a touch of creepy psychedelia, and an album which is both introspectively shoegazing and at the same time extremely expressive.

The three tracks observe many of the defining genres of black metal, such as blastbeats and tremolo picking, emphasis on repetition, harsh screamed vocals and bleakness galore and so on. But with tracks that are as long as the three compositions on this album, there is room for variation, and Chasma make good use of that by inserting heavy doom-ladden passages and more atmospheric sections into the black metal mayhem, which works very well in generating darkness and creepiness.

One thing that is interesting is that the bass is quite audible in the mix, which means that there is quite a lot of bottom to the production, which I like - it sounds less thin (but no less bleak) than a lot of other black metal releases.

This album is definitely one of the must-haves of the 2011 corpus of black metal releases.

(release originally posted at mtalmusicarchives.com)

Declarations of the Great Artificer"