Curious why you find The Spell to be better than Farseeing, but you’ve also implied there isn’t much in it for you. I guess it’ll be revealed when you post your comments.
i don't really, hence the head/heart comment. i love
the spell of retribution, it was the first new chasm album to come out after i got into them and i've rarely been more hyped for an album, i played it a fuckton as soon as it was out. over time it revealed itself to be more inconsistent than its predecessors ('fortress', 'manifest my intervention' and 'conjuring the new apocalypse' are among their weakest songs IMO, just quite muddy and draggy with too much generic chugging for my tastes, they lack that grand 'cosmic' quality or w/e), but it also contains three of my favourite chasm songs in 'the eclipse', 'retribution of the lost years' and 'remains of the covenant', and i have a lot of love for the intro/opener too.
farseeing is definitely more consistent ('the promised ravage' is the weakest cut and still good) but i don't have quite the same attachment to it, aside from the closer which i agree is one of their absolute greatest achievements. to clarify what i said about
farseeing before (and it applies to
the spell as well), the problem isn't that it doesn't flow but rather that too much of it lacks the 'narrative' quality that peaked with
deathcult; it operates more like a soundscape at times, which is fine but a little less to my tastes. with the mid-period work and
deathcult in particular, songs always seem to be going somewhere and even when they employ repetition/callbacks it feels like a natural extension of their temporal/cyclical themes, whereas the recent stuff has increasingly felt like more of a jam session to me (an accusation i think the newest album kind of validates lol). there isn't the same intensity and momentum that my absolute favourite chasm albums have (i'm a bigger slut for momentum than most people). that said,
farseeing is still awesome and i think i ranked it first for its year, it's all relative innit. i like pompey's description of the album and i think it does occupy its own niche extremely well.
