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Alright, some bitching right from the start. This album contains a CD-ROM video track for "Visions From The Spectral Attack". Now that's very nice, but it totally screws up the Windows 2000 CD Player, which has one hell of a hard time to play it (sometimes failing miserably.) When a large part of you music listening is on your PC at work, this can get very annoying. The best solution I found was to rip the songs and then burn them to a CD-R without the video track. Argh! OK, bitching's over, let's get to the good stuff.

OK, on with the music. A new The Chasm album is always welcome in my home, and this one is no exception. Interestingly, the album starts with an instrumental nearly 6 minutes in length. Quite unusual, as I've come to expect those to not exceed a couple of minutes. Almost everytime I listen to it I find myself thinking "What? Still on the first track?" :) Of course, the first question that comes to mind is how does it fare compared to 1999's "Procession to the Infraworld". Personally, I give the edge to "Procession...", but I must say the two albums sound nothing alike. There's only one song here that could have been on "Procession..." without sounding out of place (Dark Cloud.)

Overall "Conjuration..." sounds darker and doomier (not in a doom metal way, however) than its predecessor, so you could say it "rocks" a bit less and emphasises on a darker atmosphere. This could be a turnoff for some people, but rest assured that this still sounds like 110% The Chasm, just with a different twist. Daniel Corchado's vocal style here is the same as on the previous material, a very harsh and dark quasi-growl that has more in common with the more extreme thrash bands than with your typical death growl (good!) There's still enough similarities that the fans of the band's earlier work will still feel right at home here. Death/Thrash with a dark twist is what The Chasm is all about, and this album proves they're still the uncontested masters of that domain. OK that could be argued, but that's my opinion and I share it. :) The Chasm's signature sound is present in all their albums, but one sure thing is that they're not stagnating by releasing the same thing over and over. Good stuff.

Additional Information

• CD limited to 1000 hand-numbered copies
• Limited Editon on Double vinyl by Danza Ipnotica Records