Illuminations of Vile Engorgement

I've been listening to Enmity for about a year now and over time this has become one of my favourite death metal albums. 'Illuminations of Vile Engorgement' is one of those albums that you can play at absolutely any time and it will be consistantly enjoyable throughout, yet it doesn't have any catchy choruses or hooky riffs to help it. It's a very strange brutal death metal album that you will not make linear sense of, at all. There are no memorable passages, nothing is really ear-pleasingly friendly and there is near enough no melody involved whatsoever. This is the next level of death metal.

Enmity play a very strange breed of death metal and it's not too suprising that they're not too popular because of it. You'll see it described in many reviews as severely brutal, the brutality end point in death metal, and you'll see many people passing this off as some sort of extremity gimmick where the band have pushed the boundaries too far and have no good ideas to back it up. It's true that the music is very brutal, but the detractors really seem to be missing how abstract and atmospheric this album is outside of that. Those elements are so strong infact, that the brutality aspects of the album almost take a back seat to these qualities. It's almost like they stumbled upon their unique sound completely by accident, aiming to be the absolute most brutal and conjuring up something absolutely genius aswell.

Here's what you'll find on 'Illuminations of Vile Engorgement': A guitar tuned dangerously low to the point of almost indecipherable noise. The guitar alternates between tight, convulated Suffocation-inspired riffing to slower slam breakdowns that would be impossible to slam dance to due to how uninvitingly cruel they are, and then of course there's blast mode where it's near impossible to make out what the guitar is playing at all. The bass is barely audible to my ears but when I turn up the bass all I get is this thick, lurking cloud of rumbling sound in the background. Call it a wall of sound if you will. The drums simply hammer away the whole time in a stupidly tight manner, played with such precise timing that they sound programmed. There are no fills (there is nothing the slightest bit human sounding about this album), just soulless blasting that ranges from fast to very fast and will occasionally slow down on the slower break sections, although sometimes the drums will just hammer away over the breakdowns too. The drumwork seems completely random at times. The drummer will blast over one riff, then play a little slower over the same riff, then go back to blasting but this time adding cymbal runs in the background. The subtleties are so strange and so delicately placed, it's truly a very weird album.

The vocalist seems to annoy most people, presumably because he's pretty loud in the mix and never seems to shut up. Also, he isn't doing any kind of real death metal growling, instead he gurgles and snorts inhumanely over the music at random times, not really following any sort of pattern or pacing. All of this seems like I'm criticising the album but this is definitely a positive review, I've simply never heard anything like this album before. The compositions are so weird, you can put this on at any time and it's thoroughly enjoyable the whole way through, it really is more than the sum of it's parts. I think it has something to do with the riffs, the 'melodies' (that's pushing it a bit) played are so strange and unlike anything else you'll really hear in any other band, yet they're both very subtle and very minimal, and when you're not paying attention and just have this on in the background you don't even notice them, you just hear this loud, constant hammering of the drums and this strange gurgly vocalist. But I think they reach you on a subconscious level, they flow from one to the other and craft these songs that are unlike near enough anything else in death metal. The music is completely unpredictable. Fast part leads to slow breakdown, which leads to chug, then faster part, then a different fast part. The drumming is very straight forward and simple yet keeps changing pace without any logical reason why, and when listening to this album it almost feels like you're listening to someone or something that has a much higher knowledge and understanding of musical composition than you could ever comprehend, because every little change and movement feels so right yet makes no logical sense to me at same time.

This isn't memorable music, this is brutal death metal for fans of 'Putrefaction in Progress'. There are no human feelings to relate to here either, so I guess you could compare it to Fleshgrind too. Oh yeah, and they decided to place the intro in the middle of the album and then end the album with a very well played acoustic guitar piece titled 'Severe Lacerations'. I don't understand 'Illuminations of Vile Engorgement' at all, but I do understand that I love it.