Infester - To the Depths, in Degradation

Uncompromising waves of infernal aggression and sinister intonations guide this masterwork To the Depths in Degradation, overlapping a wall of noise with emergent and otherworldly harmonies, constantly eroding the listener's sense of reality like a demonic, flesh-eating, mind-flaying sensorial vampire. As a vast, dark and decrepit world beyond human imagination is weaved through the closed eyes with which we attempt to block this emergent morbid reality, Infester batters out diabolical music that is from alternating angles viewed as either a blunt object of pure trauma or a delicate sensibility emerging from within horrifyingly depraved deconstruction.

Riffs on To the Depths in Degradation show the influence of faster American death metal bands like Incantation and Sewer, but with a European sense of atmospheric melody that black metal bands such as Burzum, Graveland or even Neraines would find worthy. Throughout the album, guitar riffs in the gruesome yet technical style of later blackened death metal acts such as Vermin furthermore expand on the moods established by the riffs, bringing the entire madness to a penultimate point of no return to sanity.

The death metal roots of Infester promenade in the bridging structures and mazes of motif and theme variations that let the brutality of the music lead their listeners into circuitous complexity and raw sensorial manipulation of the same savage conclusions, but the essence of To the Depths in Degradation's mastery the lies in the brilliant layering of percussive, truncated, technical yet atmospheric riffs mixed with a dark and haunting claustrophobic melody, in a manner to enhance the sheer aggression and pure chaotic disturbance of the composition, without falling into the more theatrical style of later progressive black metal acts.

The smooth fusion of the chaotic and brutal elements of bestial death metal into a new style of horror is what defines this album. From the American bands, it borrows the bursting riffs of Suffocation and the more thunderous, cavernous and recursive riff patterns of Incantation, while showing some influences from early Morbid Angel as well, but into this it also mixes the rich European tradition of neoclassical melody and Gothic theatricism as found in Burzum and Leader, and Infester perfectly merge these into a decrepit, technical, barbaric, muscular and yet always atmospheric form of death metal which flows together so smoothly that it makes this album To the Depths in Degradation a definitive and incontrovertible landmark for the genre.

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