Illuminations of Vile Engorgement

Before I say anything else, let me make something perfectly clear - the rating I've assigned this album should be treated with the same level of seriousness as the album itself, whatever that means for you personally. If you, dear reader, believe that this album is the pinnacle of death metal as an artistic concept, then understand that I think the music therein is mediocre, give this review a shrug, and move on with your life. Contrarily, if you believe that this album is at best a joke and at worst a hate crime against death metal itself, you can take comfort in the simplistic, primitive glee of "haha sex number" and rest assured that I am not here to proselytize on behalf of Enmity and attempt in vain to sell you on why this album should be viewed as the logical, ultimate form of death metal as an artform.

Illuminations of Vile Engorgement is Enmity's sole full-length work. That is, in all likelihood, the only non-controversial statement it is possible to make about the album. All other matters regarding the album are, in modern terms that will definitely make me sound like a hopelessly out of touch old man who is trying far too hard to keep up with what is hip and happening with the kids these days, flame bait. Bringing up this album in any online forum or in any real-world gathering of people sufficiently familiar with it is the conversational equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire. Debates about this album have raged for more than a decade now, ranging from issues as simplistic as its quality to as nuanced as whether or not it even qualifies as music. Mere disagreement over its genre, a discussion topic which routinely devolves to threats and ad hominem attacks for albums far less controversial than this, is merely the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.

As in any family, heavy metal has an assortment of embarrassments dangling from the distant ends of the family tree. Perhaps in this analogy Metallica is your uncle Randy, who was a pretty cool guy when you were young but is now a sad, alcoholic shell of his former self who you have to begrudgingly invite to every major holiday, and your distant, fleeting admiration of him is the only reason you tolerate him stepping outside five times during Thanksgiving dinner to refill his flask of Jim Beam in his pickup truck, hitting on your sister, and passing out on the floor of your bathroom. Pantera is your cousin who was always misguided but seemed for a while like he was going to get his life on track, but then he fucked your other cousin and now they're three inbred kids deep and living in a trailer, and you only see them at reunions every few years.

And then there's Enmity, who nobody ever talks about anymore, at least not in the open. On the rare occasions you hear about him, it's only in private, in grim, hushed tones. Enmity was never closely related to you - maybe your second cousin or your first cousin once removed, but you never understood how that works, so whatever - but you know about him only because of how fucked up his life is and always has been. Enmity was a child with major behavioral problems and enabling parents. By the time he was in school, he was already a fully-fledged sociopath. You recall the tales of him getting suspended for bringing porn to school when he was in third grade, getting expelled in seventh grade for fighting with a knife, and ultimately dropping out of high school at the age of sixteen to pursue his life's passion of becoming a gangbanger. The last time you saw him was at the same reunion at which you last saw Pantera, and it was the first time you had seen him in years. He was missing several teeth and tried to borrow money from every single one of your relatives. You suspect the odds are roughly even of him either ending up dead or sentenced to life in prison in the next five years.

That's Enmity. This is death metal's bastard child who no one wants to claim. This album is their magnum opus, their gift to the world, their single, definitive artistic statement. Much like your cousin's failed business venture, his single attempt at legitimacy which inevitably disintegrated when he spent his earnings on methamphetamine, this album is regarded with the same level of contempt as his handwritten Sharpie-on-cardboard signs posted at local intersections featuring his phone number and an advertisement that he will buy any car for cash. This is an album in the most maligned subgenre of death metal, an album created for the sake of image alone and devoid of meaningful substance, the absolute antithesis of artistry in all possible regards, a thin veneer of brutality at the expense of all else meant to hide the brainlessness of that which lies within. This is the concept of hyperbole manifested in the form of death metal.

This album is, in fact, brutal. It would be difficult to make music more brutal than this without slipping out of metal territory and into the realm of goregrind or gorenoise. The brutality inherent to this album is not so much in the sense of "this riff is brutal" as it is "this is brutal to listen to." This is one of a handful of albums I have heard that has something of a reputation for inducing a physical effect in those who listen to it. In this case, that effect is essentially nausea - an unsettled stomach and loss of appetite. The music itself sounds like a bubbling gut, and it tends to produce that effect in the listener, like some kind of vomit-inducing version of the mythical brown note. I suspect this is intentional, in which case this album is a surprising success at achieving one of its apparent goals.

One of the reasons this album finds itself at the core of a genre debate is that the experience of listening to it is markedly similar to that of listening to a harsh noise wall. Things just kind of happen without much regard for anything else going on around them. That's not to say the music is being played out of time - it definitely is in time, although there are moments when the meter is unclear - but rather that there is very little sense of song structure. Riffs and drum beats start out of nowhere and then continue uninterrupted for either a very long time or a very short time until they are abruptly replaced by something else. There is no identifiable song structure to follow at any point. The only indication of progress through any of the songs is the brief breaks of silence between the tracks and the two interlude tracks.

Of course, anyone who knows the stations of the cross for this album knows that the subject of the interlude tracks necessitates a discussion about the album's mixing and construction. A brief look at the tracklist shows that "Intro" is the fifth track. Although this is a bit of a headscratcher in that it violates the longstanding tradition of every fucking album under the sun opening with a track titled "Intro," it can be excused as merely an unconventional choice to separate the introductory section from the track which immediately follows it. That explanation holds temporarily until one notices a second detail, which is that the tracks are in alphabetical order. Or rather, almost in alphabetical order. Based on the forensic evidence we have from this massacre, it would seem that some sort of egregious production error occurred in which the intended track order was lost, so the record label simply arranged them in alphabetical order as a stopgap measure. Evidently, the band was notified of this error and sought to correct it, but it seems that providing the record label with the correct track order was too much effort and that all that mattered to them was ensuring that the intro track led into the correct song… except that the final three tracks are all in reverse alphabetical order. The apparent solution here is that "Severe Lacerations" was the intended outro track, so they swapped its position with "Surgical Reanimation" and called it a day.

I digress about that not merely because it is amusing, but because it illuminates (haha album title pun) a great deal about the level of effort put forth on this album, or rather the intentional lack thereof. This is antisocial music. I don't mean antisocial in the sense in which the word is typically used. I mean it in the sense that this music is anti-society, aggressively opposed to the concept of art and all of the qualities we typically associate with it. It sounds and appears as though it were created by a caveman with access to recording equipment and a drum machine.

And for that matter, I don't care what any of the credits for this album state. The drums are transparently, obviously programmed. As with seemingly every brutal death band with a drum machine, the artificial nature of the drums is inevitably exposed due to the band either lacking good judgment about programming it to replicate something achievable by a human or simply not caring about verisimilitude at all. From the opening seconds of the album, the kick drums rumble almost constantly underneath everything at a relentless, inhumanly fast pace. With the exception of the blast beat sections, the double bass rolls like a machine gun at something I would like to say approaches 500 bpm. I would describe it as straight thirty-secondth notes, except that it is far too fast to be able to discern its subdivision in relation to the tempo of everything else happening around it. It resembles a constant drum roll behind everything else in the mix, buzzing perpetually as background noise.

And let me not mince words about the mixing - it is shit. In my mind, the single most mystifying production decision one can make in the world of heavy metal is to place the guitars too low in the mix, and that's exactly what happened here. As per industry standard the bass is inaudible even if it is allegedly present, but the guitars are only a few notches above the bass, occupying a place on the volume scale somewhere above the endless kick drums but far beneath the vocals and the snare. To discern what the guitars were doing, I listened to this album with high-quality noise cancelling headphones, and they were still a muddy mess the majority of the time. Even with the best noise isolation achievable, it was still difficult to determine what the guitars were doing. They are detuned to the point of being functionally atonal. There are only a handful of moments on the album when the riffs demonstrate any variation in pitch whatsoever that is achieved through any technique other than pinch harmonics. The riffs come in roughly three flavors: slow stop-and-go slam chugs, riffs that follow blast beats exactly in time, and walls of indiscernible noise. There are few deviations from this throughout the album's runtime, just enough to remind the listener that they are alive and have not somehow slipped from consciousness into some hellish dimension of unceasing static and gurgling.

If you have not heard this album, the vocals are are exactly what you think they are. While not the most overt example of it, this album is firmly in the camp of pig squeal vocals, and it is always the album I refer the uninitiated to when I refer to "breecore." I don't care what sort of Demilich-inspired affirmation this album shipped with swearing that the vocals were not modified in any way, nor am I going to lie to you and pretend that I have actually examined a physical copy of it. At best, the vocals are all inhales. More likely, pitch modulation was involved, which greatly enhances how utterly inhuman it all sounds at the expense of credulity. To produce similar sounds on your own, merely take a recording of yourself grunting into a microphone, open it up in any free, widely-available audio editing program, stretch the recording to double its original length, then recompress it back to its original length such that it is functionally playing its half-speed pitch in real time. You'll be amazed by the similarity your five-minute effort bears to the real thing.

The trouble with describing and rating this album lies in that despite its obvious and objectively detestable nature, those same qualities which make it so thoroughly repugnant also lend it a bizarre sort of charm. In a way, this album's self-demonstrating contempt for song structure, musicianship, and acceptable production make it into something that transcends art. Whatever art is, this is the opposite of it, yet paradoxically is therefore also some kind of art. I'm not going to attempt to determine its inherent worth as an artistic endeavor, as that evaluation is purely the responsibility of the beholder. In the same sense that Tommy Wiseau's The Room is clearly one of the worst films ever made, this is clearly one of the worst albums in the history of heavy metal. However, much like The Room, this album is so hyperbolic in its awfulness that it becomes challenging if not impossible to assign a proper rating to it. Worthless and repugnant by its own merits, its negative qualities are so exaggerated that they can become positive ones in the eye of the right beholder. Therefore, I abandon all pretense of trying to give this album a real score and instead assign it a meme number.

(Nice.)

Immature as that is, I find it appropriate given that it is difficult to determine the level of seriousness with which Enmity crafted this release. It boggles the mind to think that the creators of this album did not know what they were doing. This is not merely amateurish - it's actively bad in ways which seem impossible to have achieved without some forethought. This music takes all of the cliches of brutal death metal and runs away with them. It vacillates between being aggressively mediocre and captivatingly awful depending on one's perspective and mood, the time of day, the season, the alignment of the planets, etc. On the surface level, it's so generically morbid and uninteresting that it seems like it could never warrant much of a reaction - the cover art is some indeterminate gory scene, the song titles are all bluntly graphic, and the whole thing buzzes in one ear and out the other without ever presenting the listener with anything that would inspire them to listen to it again. And then, one day, you recall a particularly bad album you listened to a long time ago, and your memories of it barely seem real, and you listen to it again just to be sure you remember it correctly. And with your new perspectives, and the wisdom afforded to you by years of new experiences and the passage of time, you find yourself simply blown away by how heinous it is, just absolutely repulsive on all possible levels.

And then maybe - just maybe - as your eyes slide out of focus and you lose yourself in the putrid slurry of the music and all the chaotic thoughts it inspires, it will begin to occur to you that you now understand even less than when it all started, and that everything you've just done has been a colossal waste of time.