Illuminations of Vile Engorgement

Prior to listening to this album, one might expect the need to strap themselves in for some sort of intrusively brutal and brain-dead piece of brutal death metal. If you at all thought this, you would be sorely mistaken. Enmity's sole LP perfectly demonstrates the important distinction between brain dead and low effort death metal. Just about everything this record has to offer is completely devoid of any resemblance to creativity, which is probably the worst part about this album. If there's anything worse than a terrible album, it has to be a terribly boring album.

First of all, the guitar tone, while being decently appealing with this stiff and muddy sound, often feels drowned out by the kit and warbling gutturals. It's probably for the better though, seeing as the guitars have little to offer, such as the rest of the album. Apparently to Enmity, playing brain-dead metal sums up to just fumbling around the fret board for a couple minutes while the blast beat drones on. Once the double kick peaks its head out though, that's when you fumble around in a staccato fashion at a slower bpm. To give them the minimal credit they're due though, I will say the slight wailing feeling toward the end of Disembowel The Meek was somewhat interesting, as was the opening of Facial Carvings, which was more reminiscent of what some of the better bands of the genre have to offer. The best thing I can say about the guitar on this album is that at times, specifically for some of the first half of Rotted Divinity, I was given the fond reminder of Mortican's album "Darkest Day of Horror". All in all though, with how improvisational the album felt, you would've thought they were going for some type of Aleatoric approach.

If the guitars weren't enough like pulling teeth, the non-stop one note warbling should help push the envelope. Monotonous vocals aren't necessarily a bad thing if used properly, but like everything else on this album, the guttural performance by Rob Weber was shamefully inadequate and boring. Perhaps he was too busy deciding which two drum beats to play to think he needed any deviation from the sickeningly mundane vocal performance he was giving out. There is not a single point on this album in which he tries something different, and I understand that in this instance the vocals are more of an instrument than a communication device, but if anything that should be all the more motivation to differentiate your performance in my opinion.

It's really difficult to pin down a single worst aspect of this album, but the drums were at the very least inoffensive as compared to the rest of the album. What's generally frustrating, but in this case is probably the one bright side to the album is how cookie-cutter the drums are. The tone sounds like it was straight out of the store, no character, just a regular sounding snare, a regular sounding kick, etc. As mentioned earlier, there's basically two "settings" if you will for the drums: blast beat and fast double-kick. I would say that at least the drums did their job in carrying a beat, but honestly the way the album was mixed had the drums drown out the groove anyways so it doesn't really serve a purpose.

In some ways, this album is genius because it spends the first 20 minutes or so subverting your expectations so hard, that when the last four tracks are marginally better comparatively speaking, the audience is almost tricked into thinking those last few tracks are good. Backhanded compliments out of the way, there is some minor credit to be given on said tracks, such as the earlier mentioned Rotted Divinity. Rotted Divinity opens with a proud belch, probably the best of Rob Weber's performance. It stagnates for a little while, but this mid-paced riff kicks in about a minute into the song and is followed with some harmonics that actually make the song an interesting listen. Additionally, the breakdown probably saw the most unique (though still rather uninteresting) drum section on the entire project. Following this track, Surgical Reanimation, while still not showcasing any amazing musicianship, does have a couple of intriguing moments where Enmity utilizes some stop and start riffs, and towards the end they get rather intense with this fast descending riff. Skinned Alive probably comes the closest to pulling off the proper brain-dead feeling correctly, especially in its midsection where they play this soul-suckingly monotonous mid-tempo riff that actually isn't painful to listen to. Lastly, Enmity closes out with this surprising acoustic piece, Severe Lacerations that at the beginning reminds me of some of the soundtrack to the last of us. The track is almost comedic in how different it is from the rest of the album, not just in how soft the song is, but how much more thought went into the composition. It can be rather hit or miss at times, for example I do not like the use of the the acoustic guitar for percussion about a minute in, and there are times where it feels like Chad Weber struggles to actually press the fret down in time to get the proper sound out, but overall it's actually a fairly decent closer.

So in sum, the first seven tracks are so bad that the last four seem actually decent just by existing. Even the best tracks on the album are only decent at certain moments in their duration, and outside of the closer which is a giant step away from the genre that Enmity plays, none of them seem to have an overall redeeming quality that would make the listener want to come back. Truly, from "intro" being track number five to the terrible mixing to the surprise acoustic piece, this album is a sloppy disasterpiece.