I read somewhere recently that "good" music is one that AFFECTS you -makes you ponder about it, makes you feel something different and influences the steps in your life. Take a slightly different version of that argument and you could say that truly brutal music doesn’t just pound on you or zap your energy or even take your life. A truly brutal music (and intelligent one, at that) decimates your body, crushes your bones to dust, drains your veins of the last drop of blood, rips away your soul and enslaves it. Your soul then wanders mesmerized, lost unto eternity in the blazing grounds of Hades. Immolation fits in closely with this description of "brutal" music. If not anything else, at least in term of "heaviness", I am yet to come across a band to match Immolation. "Close To A World Below" is Immolation’s fourth album (supposedly their finest work to date). It’s difficult to classify this band under any sub-genre of death metal, or even metal (Not that it really matters – but it enables easier description of the music) . The music is dark, the lyrics are anti-Christ ian , the vocals are deep (neither a growl nor a shriek). The pace of the songs is not ultra fast, but mid-tempo. It actually adds to the heaviness and you can actually feel the crush and the squeeze of the heaviness as the band plummets along. What is commendable about their music is while the band is relentlessly brutal / heavy, they also have melody in their riffs. In fact, the best part of the guitaring (in quite a few songs) was the sudden "peeping" in of a melodic burst in between the heavy riffs – the harmonies literally sneak in and fly out. The perfect sense of timing and creativity make this "infringement", if I might call it, extremely impressive. Overall, this album is very strong – anybody who’s into extreme, harsh music will love this package of brutality and brilliance. Personally, I found just two drawbacks in this album. For one, the lyrics are clichéd rumblings against Christianity; secondly, as a whole album, the sound is a bit monotonous. However, seeing that we Indian headbangers hardly get original death metal albums and taking into consideration that the album definitely stands above other "join-the bandwagon" releases, it definitely wouldn’t be a wrong decision to buy this from Music Gallery.