Illuminations of Vile Engorgement

If I had to make a list of albums that would hold up after 15 years Enmity's 2005 full length is not one I would have had on there. I mean, it's a stupid novelty stupid brutal death act of stupidity intended to ramp up the stupid intensity to the point where it feels like a stupid parody after all. This wasn't the most brutal thing even put out in 2005 with bands like Devourment putting out shit far more capable of making you want to throw your face at walls, and indeed, there's bands doing similar things with more notes and more speed and heavier sounds like Encenathrakh around today. Illuminations of Vile Engorgement feels like something set to be little more than a joke within a few years at most... but here we are, with an album unmatched in its class of overt stupidity even today, and still something any brutal death metal listener owes themselves an exposure to do.

It’s very easy to describe what Enmity's brand of stupidity is, but very hard to explain why it's so different. In the most basic of terms they play hyper speed scattershot brutal death metal in the vein of a decidedly less riffy and hooky Brodequin, with a decrepit and cheap guitar tone that blurs into a pretty indecipherable wall with any tempos approaching about a third as fast as most of their... music? is. They then break this up with some rudimentary slams which the shitty guitar tone is absolutely not cut out for. Lastly the vocals are multitracked mic cupped gurgles with a decent amount of tonal shifting and layering combos but absolutely nothing approaching a hook or infectious rhythm. Ya know, it's all the standard tropes of mid 2000's ultra brutal BDM on a surface level turned up to the point of absurdity.

What makes Illuminations of Vile Engorgement so special is its specific lack of musicality. With most brutal death metal, no matter how brutal, there's still a structure to it. Riffs have little climaxes to them and reset or switch to another one, drums have a fill or accent beat to keep the measures and bars still recognisable, but this just doesn't. There'll be an onslaught of an unerring blast, the guitars pick random nonsense with no resolutions to chains of them and the vocals gurgle out whatever stream of consciousness they feel like with layers and layers going on at once with no pauses or repeated patterns or obvious stanza completions; it's a pure fucking wall. And then the band will just sit on it for an excessive, unbroken period. I'm talking up to around 45 seconds straight with absolutely no resolution to any of the music going on. It. Just. Keeps. Going. It's a sustained wall of noisy nonsense.

I absolutely love this aspect of the band, it's not remotely pleasant as musical experience and there's absolutely nothing infectious or headbangable about it, it's more like a bizarre anti-art joke that keeps going on and on to the point of being comedic. After all these years it's still wonderfully one of a kind. While far from being something to listen to frequently it's an absolute blast to just sit in awe of from time to time.

The album isn't a perfect statement of amusical obnoxious anti-genius by any means. The slams, while useful in breaking up those sustained passages of complete stupid nonsense, aren't very good by themselves. They're not particularly compelling calls to wreck shit with groove, and that falls-apart-into-messy-chaos guitar tone is not remotely viable as a brutal neck snapper. Likewise at 32 minutes, 29 of which are gurgle gurgle brbrbrbrbrbrbr, it's a little stretched for something so inherently devoid of identity and differentiation in its general proceedings. Then again, running long is part of what makes the complete fuck-you-to-the-concept-of-bars sections so compelling, so it'd probably be ill-fitting for them to not push the obnoxiousness as far as possible.

So yeah, these are some supremely worthwhile walls of nonsense for those who are keen to experience some walls of nonsense. There's heavier. There's more extreme. There's noisier. There’s wilder and more experimental. There's stupider. But there's nothing quite as specifically Enmity as Enmity were.