We Have Seen the Enemy... and the Enemy Is Us

Rising Realm Records appears to have been sort of a localized version of Crash Music for Sweden, being a similar label that would basically release anything if the band was willing to work with them. They weren't officially a part of Crash, of course, but it seems that a band who inked a deal with Rising Realm would be distributed by Crash soon after. Of course, this is before Rising Realm disappeared with the rights to a number of Swedish bands' albums, releasing few of them but essentially blockading the bands from ever making any money from them. Life goes on, no one remembers the label.

One of the records Rising Realm actually managed to put out was this, the debut album by Enemy Is Us, which, if I'm not mistaken... was distributed by Crash in the US. Whatever. Anyway, based on those associations, this is just about as generic and uninspired as you would expect: somewhat Gothenburg-influenced death/thrash, like a super low-budget Illdisposed, but more similar to Crash bands like Rising Moon (minus the catchiness) or twenty other bands I own CDs from but can't remember the names of. What you are hearing in your mind is exactly what the music sounds like: wandering melodeath riffs tempered by a thrash sense of amelodic construction apart from the more openly harmonized choruses, shrieky Gothenburg vocals, and rather static, bored drumming. They also make the terrible decision of slowing to a midtempo occasionally to be extra boring, like on 'Demon Song'. Note: if a band uses the word 'song' in a song title, it is rarely a good sign.

Verse/chorus structures are employed for most of the songs, which is frankly to the band's benefit as a more specialized form of songwriting would be disastrous. The riffs are pretty lazy, a grab bag of thrash breaks, Gothenburg b-sides, and the occasional flirting with US-style metalcore inspired melodeath. Pacing is off too; plenty of times on this album the band will have no idea how to get to the chorus of a song again, so they'll just sort of stop everything and then go to the chorus, like you're not going to notice how clumsy the musical device was. Frankly, the whole album is similarly club-footed; rarely do riffs dovetail in a meaningful way and the primary mode of the band, rather than 'fast' or 'slow' tends to be 'sitting around'; I've never heard thrash beats sound more tired.

This is just another one of the six million metal CDs you never need to come in contact with. Inoffensive but completely and utterly disposable.

When I got this CD I had no clue what to expect whatsoever, so in a way the outcome was a pleasant surprise. It´s a straight-forward melodic deathmetal with some old-school thrashmetal influence - seen mainly on the drum lines and some guitar riffs.

This CD gives you a good first impression with some astounding vocals, and simple-but-effective guitar riffs. The music´s harmonic and melodic lines are well developed, despite its simplicity. On the other hand, it´s the simplicity that makes on the drum lines really poor. They sound pretty much the same throughout the whole CD, with, mainly, a slow blastbeat. In some rare occasions Magnus Ingels shows what he can do, but the lack of diversity on the drums is definitely a major turn off.

On the overall this is a good CD. Nothing innovative but they delivered what they intended to. But don´t expect anything new or exceptional.

The high-points of this CD are: Track 2 - Cold as Hate, Track 7 - Plagued from Whithin, and 8 - The Walking Dead