Illuminations of Vile Engorgement

You know, I didn't have to listen to every song on this album in order to review it. I could have just listened to any random song on this album for not even the entire length of the track, written this review based on those 30 seconds I let this pile of crap penetrate my ears, and been just as accurate in my statements and points as if I had listened to the entire thing. I didn't. I sadly, regretfully, shamefully didn't. I listened to all 33 terrible, horrible, no good, very bad minutes of Emnity's Illuminations of Vile Engorgement, and I oh so desperately want them back so I can instead use them on a record that isn't just a random assortment of gurgling noises. Yes, dear readers, Emnity's one album (even though it's just barely over EP length) is indeed one of the dumbest, most pointless excursions in nonsense brutal death metal noise that has ever soiled the genre's undergarments. It is honestly extremely difficult for me to believe that anyone can find something like this incredible, but they do, and I'm left sitting in my chair flabbergasted as a result.

As mentioned, I did not need to listen to the entirety of Illuminations of Vile Engorgement, reason being that of the 11 songs on this disc, 9 of them sound 100% identical to each other. I'm not saying that as some kind of hyperbolic description meant to symbolize how bad the record is, either. I am being absolutely serious when I say that nearly each and every song here sounds completely the same as the one that came before it and the one that comes after it. Each song hovers around 3:00 minutes, give or take 10 or 20 seconds and save for two songs that surpass the 3:30 mark, and each of them consist of what could very well have been a 10 or 15 second loop of random as hell open note guitar chugging and drums that do almost nothing but play blast beats and super fast double bass repeated for nearly the entire length of any given track. Occasionally breaking up these sections are moments when the drums will continue to do the same hyperspeed double bass rolling, but will cease blasting and instead hit the snare drum at absolute random without any sense of time signature while the guitars continue to chug along with no rhythm or structure to be found. Was this album written in free time? I want to know, because it sure as hell sounds like it. On top of this will be some of the worst vocals to ever disgrace extreme metal. They just puke up all over the songs with absolutely no regard for the music, and there's no power or weight behind them at all, sounding like someone grunted into a microphone and then shifted the pitch down to the lowest it could possibly go. The only two tracks that in any way stray from this sound are a 30 second intro tune (which for some idiotic reason is the 5th track on the disc) and a closing acoustic guitar instrumental. The interlude is wholly unnecessary, just being some dungeon-esq ambient noises, while the acoustic song sounds like just a bunch of random notes being played by a beginner. At the VERY least the album is short and goes by quite quickly, but even then the two songs that decide to go for slightly longer than everything else drag their ankles through the sludge for what feels like an eternity. It would be laughable if it wasn't so atrocious.

Do I even need to talk about the instruments and the production quality, because they seem like forgone conclusions the moment you see the genre label of "brutal death metal" next to the band's name. The guitars are tuned to some ungodly low tuning, with every last note sounding like it was played on the open Q string, and yes I know that there is no such tuning as Q, but that's what it sounds like. If a real drummer actually played that instrument on this record, you could have fooled me a million times over, as the drumming consists of nothing but blasting, double bass, the occasional bizarre snare hit, and the even more rare fill or roll. The sound of the drums themselves just sound like a broken blender fidgeting back and forth without the motor completely dying. The production quality does the noise no favors, because despite being actually quite clear with everything audible (save bass, but the guitar tone sounding so terrible and low that they might as well be bass), it doesn't add any heaviness to the material. Instead, it somewhat detracts from what the band were trying to do, with the guitars having no weight behind them whatsoever, the drums just being a bunch of clicking noises, and the vocals, as mentioned, being some of the thinnest and least powerful gurgles you will ever hear on a death metal record. It only adds a nice layer of lameness to the music's horrendous nature.

Illuminations of Vile Engorgement is the absolute bottom of the proverbial barrel when it comes to brutal death metal. No other act in this style aside from probably Artery Eruption reaches the depths that this band's noise sinks to. Even Mortician, a band that I cannot stand the sound of, has more merit than Emnity does, and even though I don't consider it the worst album I've ever listened to, it definitely comes close to dethroning Lulu from that position. As mentioned before, it's extremely difficult for me to understand how someone can listen to such garbage as this album and find value in it, and it's not because I don't "get" what the band were trying to do. They were trying to make the most blatantly brutal record that could be made. They just managed to completely suck at it and tried way too hard at succeeding in their set objective, like an unsigned band that spams their Kickstarter fund's page all over the place and then doesn't reach their goal. In the realm of trying to make the most intense and ridiculously heavy record a band possibly can make, Above by Samael accomplishes this objective much more than Emnity's record despite not being death metal, as the band on that album combined ridiculous intensity and extremity with actual songwriting that managed to be really, really good, something that Emnity never can or will do. In the end, Emnity and Illuminations of Vile Engorgement are to brutal death metal what Brain Drill is to tech death; a magnificently failed attempt at taking a style to the most extreme it can be, becoming a legendary waste of time in the process.

P.S. What in the fuck is going on in the album art? It looks like a giant bent pants leg expelling gore from its bottom inside of an unrealistically well lit cave.