The Chasm “The Scars of a Lost Reflective Shadow” Review
Lux Inframundis Productions (2022)
The Chasm’s albums live or die by their riff quality, and Scars of a Lost Reflective Shadow contains the weakest, least-interesting set of licks that vocalist/guitarist/lyricist/composer Daniel Corchado has come up with since 1996’s From The Lost Years.
His picking & fretting style on this disc predominantly consists of generic galloping backup tracks riding below high-mounted tremolo runs, which traverse many weirdly dissonant intervals with disappointingly little of the traditional melody or magickull chordery that made Deathcult… and Conjuration… contemporary thrash masterpieces. This isn’t the enlightening, ear-catching type of dissonance that Demilich’s Nespithe, Gorguts’ Erosion of Sanity, or Voivod’s Dimension Hatross display in spades; rather, it’s the kind of noisy, off-key clattering one’d be irked to hear leaking out from some concrete block-supported, portable bandroom packed with toothbraced and bespeckled middle schoolers.
Maybe post-COVID brain fog bogged down this record’s compositional process, because the forty-year-old, hair-thinned Corchado certainly has been headbanging long enough to know better than to type his doctoral candidate name atop such bloated, badly researched, poorly structured body paragraphs. Scars… sounds like he simply took all of the leftover, transitional, mid-song-style riffs from his past decade of CD-storming sessions, randomly pasted them together in Pro Tools, then said to hell with adding any intro, solo, or outro sections to these songs, as they just build, and build, and build, up to nothing but an abrupt fadeout or a single-digits-span of silence—paperclipping an(other) unseemly cadential extension onto the next in medias res track.
At least Dark Angel’s Time Does Not Heal had several cool-sounding introductory segments scattered amongst its massive black hole of shapeless, unmemorable riffage; The Chasm’s newly uncovered pool of opaque, vacuumed-up, oxygen-deprived songs—despite its triple-digit riff count—amounts to little more than an artistically empty portal to nowhere.
Rude Owls 