Ataraxiis

Looking at the titles on this album, I thought this was going to be very depressive BM musically as well as lyrically and I imagined something slow, self-pitying, introverted and perhaps on the doomy side. Am I ever wrong:"Ataraxiis" is extremely aggressive and frantic nearly all the way through. There's even the tendency to rock out in parts! Enoid's style includes death metal influences in the bass lines and percussion, and such influences ground the otherwise high-pitched brittle BM element into something very solid and three-dimensional, and provide the bounce and melody that are needed to push the music on. Sometimes the rhythm section is the most dominant part of the act's presentation, the BM guitars either absent or flailing away in the background. In all that fury, it's no surprise perhaps that the croaky vocals fight a losing battle to be heard and usually end up as just another texture that occasionally breaks out from the package.

The eleven tracks aren't all that distinct from one another and they usually include several sets of rhythms, melodies and riffs that change constantly. The overall impression I get is of eleven linked episodes in an over-arching work and that may very well have been Enoid's intention. For all that, there are some songs that stand out. "Black Thought" has a strong driving death metal rhythm that in the second half of the song becomes almost boppy and danceworthy. "Humanicide" is a schizophrenic patchwork of rhythms varying wildly in speed before the whole thing settles down about the third minute and becomes fairly steady. "Under a Blood-Red sky" features a spoken word intro of self-loathing that dives into a surprisingly sprightly set of happy rhythms and bright riffing. "The End of Days" sounds like another cheerful dancey track in spite of the title and for once the ghoulish vocals dominate the track before the vibrato guitars take over.

Enoid sounds very much like a full band attacking the songs with heaps of enthusiasm and energy to spare. Imagine my surprise when I found out there's just one guy called Bornyhake involved! To play all his parts, he must have been hooked up to stacks of IV bags pumping speed juice continually into his veins - pounding all those tom-toms and snares at close to Mach 1 speed can't have been an easy job. When all is over after 50 minutes, it's you the listener who's left feeling king-hit between the ears and needing a good lie-down if you're not already flat on your back on the floor. Perhaps Bornyhake / Enoid is in too much of a hurry to make his name - there's not a lot of finesse here, it's all energy and punishing rhythms and riffs delivered efficiently in a no-nonsense way - but I think this is his third album so he has plenty of time to consider a more subtle method of attack on future recordings. Then again, perhaps he doesn't have very much time, because he's involved in another one-man act called Borgne and he plays in several other bands. Maybe he really does live on speed juice, who knows?