Infester - To The Depths, In Degradation (CD)

Facts Infester are utterly unselfconscious in their playing. This is a terrifying, overwrought, all-consuming, atmospheric piece of death metal that simply could not work without total commitment from these musicians. In 1994, death metal was still a young person's sport. And while we can agree that most of the canonized releases in the genre appeared in the early 1990s, signs of real maturity for the genre were already there when Infester released their debut, with a rare alchemy of mood and compositional architecture, a balance that is hard to replicate in a conscious mind. Thus, just like King Crimson's “Red,” it seems to emerge from the genre's collective nightmares, and few albums can compete with Infester's To the Depths, in Degradation, an undeniable masterpiece from the genre's golden age.