but deliberately obscuring production IS paying attention to presentation more than the spirit of the music. The OP is arguing for an honest production/representation. The mistake is that everyone, including the OP, is assuming they know the motivations of Infester: was it laziness? was it deliberate? In Infester's case, I tend to disagree w/ the OP, it probably was a deliberate touch, and an effective one that syncs up with the spirit of the album. But the broader point, in my mind, is that a straight forward, honest production is hard to argue against, and it does, in fact, indicate that one is NOT paying attention to the presentation more than the spirit of the music.
I don't know the intention of Infester, you are quite right about that. The simple fact is that deliberately obscuring the production was a mistake. I"ll continue:
What do you think of the production on pierced from within? curious.
Masterful, brilliant, and pleasing to the ears, which brings me to my next point.
Just want to say i finished listening to INFESTER, i enjoyed it all the way through, very memorable.
Infester is awesome. I just never commented on this thread because you can't win with people who are sticklers for production.
It first dawned on me that maybe the problem is that it's a matter of personal taste. But I won't settle for that. I tend to believe that there's a generally accepted consensus on what sounds "good" and what sounds "bad". Subsonic rumbles ripping through your subwoofers and high pitched smoke alarms don't sound good. They hurt your ears. It's not pleasing to the sense of hearing. Humans innately have a sense of what they want to hear, regardless of their musical taste. While Forest Poetry is admittedly one of my favorite albums of all time, I do acknowledge that it doesn't appeal to what humans would generally agree upon as a "good" sounding album. I let that slide with bands like Ildjarn, however, because as I pointed out before, the beauty of their music is that it's a message encoded in noise.
That doesn't work with Death Metal. The more complex moving parts a machine has, the more likely it is to break down.
Inanna, I believe you said it was probably a deliberate touch. You might be right about that, but it was a mistake. What I'm saying is, they could have gotten their artistic point across AND THEN SOME with a better, more unique production. They could have made their music stand out, not only with better representation of the instruments (after all, why write complex riffs if you can't hear them in the final mix), but with a unique sound that would make theirs stand out from anything ever done. To me the production on To The Depths... Sounds a lot like Incantation's Onward to Golgotha.
I'll always like Ildjarn, Infester, and Incantation, but as a matter of personal taste, and I know I'm not the only person with this sentiment, I prefer albums that make me glad for every dime I spent on my stereo system. Pierced From Within, Close to a World Below, Obscura, From Wisdom to Hate, all sound beautiful and they give my ears a raging hard boner.