Illuminations of Vile Engorgement

When you are trying to establish any kind of ranking order in the mess of things, one can't judge Enmity like other bands, critical perception based on songwriting skills, sound design, artistic devition or proud genre spanking savagery is just a method to put this band back in line. Fans do not repeatedly fall in love with Enmity because they are a very very very brutal death metal band. The world is filled to the brim with other bands from the same stock, people that are blasting, growling, pig squealing, shredding and chugging along like there is no tomorrow, what's one more or less band in the eye of greater things?

It's not the question of what this album hast to offer, but what it demands from you instead. Enmity put you to work. Make you look at yourself. If you play this at a party, even as a joke, the effect will wear off pretty quickly. Enmity has to be inhaled alone, on the borders of nihilism and depression, this album starts to make sense when everything else has long stopped making any goddamn sense at all. Being alone with it, you will lose the urge to ridicule it in any way because it is most certainly not ridiculous.

All masks of optimized consumerism and parasocial attachment are stripped away, there are no lies present, what you hear is what you get.There is no drum performance, instead you get the abstract essence of brutal death metal drumming hammered into your ears. That is a difference in motivation, isn't it? There is no beginning and no end with these blastbeats, it does not matter at which point in time you and the blasts are. They just are, like you. And that can be pretty frightening. The occasional visit of a snare hit during the double bass ridden slam passages is just there to remind you that snares exist. We are not here for the rhythm or the money.

As paradoxical as it sounds, the communication between your self and this album can only be established when you both start to take each other seriously. Enmity are meeting you half way, the rest is up to you. You can listen to this record for 20 times and the chances are high that you will still not be able to decipher the riffs with your ears. But you will stop caring about that and be fascinated by the fast plectrum on his journey through cold lands, up and down, down and up. This guitar is not played to entertain, the notes are a by-product of looking within. And I'm not sure if the dudes behind Enmity knew what kind of strange work they were creating at the time. But here it is, so much more than quickly admired and forgotten brutal death metal. Does any one really care what the vocals are gargling about? It's enough they are present. Like an ugly wall that you can still lean against. The wall doesn't care if your jacket gets dirty. But it also won't let you down. Letting you down is YOUR job.

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.

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.

I'm kinda stuck at giving this album a rating number. I wanna give it a number higher than 90, but I don't know which one to choose? Whatever. I think a 93 will do. I want to give this a 95 as well but it feels like too much. Shit, whatever. I kinda wanna rate this lower as well, but like.... I can't, because I like this. Lol. This album is good and bad at the same time. The good is the instrumentals, the bad is the vocals and the way the guitar is played. Although flawed, I still dig this.

This album is definitely some of the nastiest shit ever, it literally sounds like a rumbly stomach if it was a person talking, for an example. The guitars for sure have their own sound, and a slightly different sound that we don't exactly hear that often in brutal death metal. It's down-tuned and sounds rusty, stale, scratchy, and bloated. It's a good ass guitar sound for sure, it's pretty damn heavy and truly does create a nasty atmosphere, like a room full of dismembered rotting corpses with feces everywhere. The guitar is both great as fuck and flawed. Has an amazing and ideal sound, but the songwriting, (specifically the guitar parts) is just randomly scattered playing for the most part. Most of the guitar on the album are just super fast chugs following the snare blasts, followed by some light wankery and pattern changes in the riffing, and that's pretty much how it is for the entirety of the album. Obviously it's bad and is a giant clusterfuck, but I like it? It's something you'll notice for forever but you'll also seem to fall for it and not really give a fuck. It's messy, it's sloppy, there's no brain cells. But I still manage to like it a lot. I've heard people say that "Even noisegrinders won't accept this crap." I mean they may be right but this album is truly reminiscent of goregrind/noise(grind) if you will. This record is pretty much just goregrind played in the style of brutal death metal, with fewer brain cells.

The drums aren't bad at all, the drummer is a damn great drummer that's super consistent with blast beats, double kick, fills, and everything else. And the drums have magnificent sound. The snare is clanky yet refined and the double kicks sound like someone tapping a hardwood floor with the end of their shoes, but put near a microphone and with some bass to it. It's great. Along with the guitars, the drums make this album heavy as balls, musically. I really really really like the drum sound on this album. It's perfect in my opinion, and again; heavy as absolute shit. It's pretty much the most redeeming feature of this album. The only downside of the drums is that there's no variety at all, it's just blast beat after blast beat followed by some quick fills, ride cymbal hits, sudden snare breaks to where it shifts towards cymbal hits, and then more blast beats. The drumming is just blast beats galore. Computerized drums could easily take his place. It's so simplistic yet it's so fulfilling and good as hell. The lack of variety in drums doesn't really bother me. In most brutal death metal the drums don't have much variety in the first place. Reguardless, this album is constantly doing the same few things on purpose. It's meant to constantly and consistently blast beat away, that's just the style of this album. I love the drum sound, I love the consistency and perfection in the blast beats and playing, there's not exactly anything wrong with the drums except for they do the same thing 24/7, but it's not that big of a bother, for me at least.

Now here's the part of the album that actually makes it bad, or makes it a huge chunk of bad, the vocals. Now obviously, I absolutely love and adore nasty brutal disgusting vocals that sound like a nasty toilet bowl, I absolutely love em. But the vocals here actually hurt my head at times. They're excruciating, I just don't understand why they need to sound like this. The vocals sound like a drunk fat man and a pig both simultaneously burping, while 5 glass plates are vigorously being scratched with forks. Now take that and put microphones up to the man and the pig, as well as the plates and combine it. There you go, that's the vocals on Illuminations of Vile Engorgement. I do like how fucking gross and rambunctious they are, but cmon dude, why does it have to sound like a fucking metallic craphole screaming? There's truly no need for this. I appreciate the effort but I'd like this album alot more if the vocals weren't so annoying. Sure, I can jam this entire album with earbuds when I'm in the mood and I don't really pay close attention to the vocals and I tune it out, but you still acknowledge it's existence. Again, good effort and display, but my god...why?

Even though this album has it's bad side, the good side prevents me entirely from hating it. Like I said previously, ABSOLUTELY LOVE the drum sound and the drumming, it's the best part and aspect of the album, that's a fact. The guitar is low tuned and fucking heavy and gives off a stale, deep, repugnant feel. I just love it so much. Great sounding drums with consistent playing and blasting, along with a low-tuned ball-dropping guitar tone. This is great, sorry not sorry. I'd probably hate this if the drums and guitar sounded any different from the way that they do. I can't forget about the cover art as well. I really like the artwork, ALOT. This is definitely the type of stuff I like. It's gorey, brutal, and it's just so great. The music definitely fits perfectly with the cover, that's for sure. Definitely one of my favorite album covers of all time. FUCKING LOVE IT. 10/10 cover.

The entire album is just constant blast beats over a wall of incoherent guitaring with retarded, squealing, gurgling vocals. Funny that it ends off with an instrumental acoustic guitar track. I mean, we have to get a break at some point, right? The acoustic track isn't bad either. It's pretty damn good actually. It's peaceful, great, and played excellent. I enjoy this. It's flawless in all honesty. It has spanish guitar-esque style and playing (I think). And it's quite great if I say so myself. I heard that apparently someone fucked up in the studio and put all the tracks in alphabetical order. Maybe this track wasn't meant to be at the end of the album? Who knows? It seems like it does but it probably wasn't meant to be, but we'll never know, doesn't matter. It's just funny that this is at the end of the album after all that other stuff on the record. Lol, this band…

In conclusion, this album is an absolute masterpiece, but also bad at the same time. It has great instrumentals, but they're not executed properly or the best way they could be due to the inconsistent guitar playing and the dumpster vocals. This album in all honesty does deserve a high score, especially since it's loveable reguardless of the bad parts all at the same time. This record and band stand out from a lot of your average and commonly known brutal death metal, they just exist. Enmity is doing their own thing. They're just chilling. If the guitar playing was fixed up and was less thrown around with riffs scattered everywhere, and the vocals were less annoying, I swear to you; this album would get far less hate, or even none at all. Realistically, fixing up all the issues on this album would be ideal, but honestly if only the vocals were better it would be fine as is. The vocals are the main reason why this record is hated so much, and it's obvious.

I'll say that I'm a fan of the band and like their work, which I do. But I'm not denying that it's suckish. Enmity manages to make suckish things appealing, and that's the case here. It's a beauty what they can do. I'm sure it's this way for other people too, especially and mainly fellow brutal death metal fans/fanatics.

If you like retarded and obnoxious nasty ass heavy brutal death metal, then this is your album right here.

Before I say anything else, let me make something perfectly clear - the rating I've assigned this album should be treated with the same level of seriousness as the album itself, whatever that means for you personally. If you, dear reader, believe that this album is the pinnacle of death metal as an artistic concept, then understand that I think the music therein is mediocre, give this review a shrug, and move on with your life. Contrarily, if you believe that this album is at best a joke and at worst a hate crime against death metal itself, you can take comfort in the simplistic, primitive glee of "haha sex number" and rest assured that I am not here to proselytize on behalf of Enmity and attempt in vain to sell you on why this album should be viewed as the logical, ultimate form of death metal as an artform.

Illuminations of Vile Engorgement is Enmity's sole full-length work. That is, in all likelihood, the only non-controversial statement it is possible to make about the album. All other matters regarding the album are, in modern terms that will definitely make me sound like a hopelessly out of touch old man who is trying far too hard to keep up with what is hip and happening with the kids these days, flame bait. Bringing up this album in any online forum or in any real-world gathering of people sufficiently familiar with it is the conversational equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire. Debates about this album have raged for more than a decade now, ranging from issues as simplistic as its quality to as nuanced as whether or not it even qualifies as music. Mere disagreement over its genre, a discussion topic which routinely devolves to threats and ad hominem attacks for albums far less controversial than this, is merely the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.

As in any family, heavy metal has an assortment of embarrassments dangling from the distant ends of the family tree. Perhaps in this analogy Metallica is your uncle Randy, who was a pretty cool guy when you were young but is now a sad, alcoholic shell of his former self who you have to begrudgingly invite to every major holiday, and your distant, fleeting admiration of him is the only reason you tolerate him stepping outside five times during Thanksgiving dinner to refill his flask of Jim Beam in his pickup truck, hitting on your sister, and passing out on the floor of your bathroom. Pantera is your cousin who was always misguided but seemed for a while like he was going to get his life on track, but then he fucked your other cousin and now they're three inbred kids deep and living in a trailer, and you only see them at reunions every few years.

And then there's Enmity, who nobody ever talks about anymore, at least not in the open. On the rare occasions you hear about him, it's only in private, in grim, hushed tones. Enmity was never closely related to you - maybe your second cousin or your first cousin once removed, but you never understood how that works, so whatever - but you know about him only because of how fucked up his life is and always has been. Enmity was a child with major behavioral problems and enabling parents. By the time he was in school, he was already a fully-fledged sociopath. You recall the tales of him getting suspended for bringing porn to school when he was in third grade, getting expelled in seventh grade for fighting with a knife, and ultimately dropping out of high school at the age of sixteen to pursue his life's passion of becoming a gangbanger. The last time you saw him was at the same reunion at which you last saw Pantera, and it was the first time you had seen him in years. He was missing several teeth and tried to borrow money from every single one of your relatives. You suspect the odds are roughly even of him either ending up dead or sentenced to life in prison in the next five years.

That's Enmity. This is death metal's bastard child who no one wants to claim. This album is their magnum opus, their gift to the world, their single, definitive artistic statement. Much like your cousin's failed business venture, his single attempt at legitimacy which inevitably disintegrated when he spent his earnings on methamphetamine, this album is regarded with the same level of contempt as his handwritten Sharpie-on-cardboard signs posted at local intersections featuring his phone number and an advertisement that he will buy any car for cash. This is an album in the most maligned subgenre of death metal, an album created for the sake of image alone and devoid of meaningful substance, the absolute antithesis of artistry in all possible regards, a thin veneer of brutality at the expense of all else meant to hide the brainlessness of that which lies within. This is the concept of hyperbole manifested in the form of death metal.

This album is, in fact, brutal. It would be difficult to make music more brutal than this without slipping out of metal territory and into the realm of goregrind or gorenoise. The brutality inherent to this album is not so much in the sense of "this riff is brutal" as it is "this is brutal to listen to." This is one of a handful of albums I have heard that has something of a reputation for inducing a physical effect in those who listen to it. In this case, that effect is essentially nausea - an unsettled stomach and loss of appetite. The music itself sounds like a bubbling gut, and it tends to produce that effect in the listener, like some kind of vomit-inducing version of the mythical brown note. I suspect this is intentional, in which case this album is a surprising success at achieving one of its apparent goals.

One of the reasons this album finds itself at the core of a genre debate is that the experience of listening to it is markedly similar to that of listening to a harsh noise wall. Things just kind of happen without much regard for anything else going on around them. That's not to say the music is being played out of time - it definitely is in time, although there are moments when the meter is unclear - but rather that there is very little sense of song structure. Riffs and drum beats start out of nowhere and then continue uninterrupted for either a very long time or a very short time until they are abruptly replaced by something else. There is no identifiable song structure to follow at any point. The only indication of progress through any of the songs is the brief breaks of silence between the tracks and the two interlude tracks.

Of course, anyone who knows the stations of the cross for this album knows that the subject of the interlude tracks necessitates a discussion about the album's mixing and construction. A brief look at the tracklist shows that "Intro" is the fifth track. Although this is a bit of a headscratcher in that it violates the longstanding tradition of every fucking album under the sun opening with a track titled "Intro," it can be excused as merely an unconventional choice to separate the introductory section from the track which immediately follows it. That explanation holds temporarily until one notices a second detail, which is that the tracks are in alphabetical order. Or rather, almost in alphabetical order. Based on the forensic evidence we have from this massacre, it would seem that some sort of egregious production error occurred in which the intended track order was lost, so the record label simply arranged them in alphabetical order as a stopgap measure. Evidently, the band was notified of this error and sought to correct it, but it seems that providing the record label with the correct track order was too much effort and that all that mattered to them was ensuring that the intro track led into the correct song… except that the final three tracks are all in reverse alphabetical order. The apparent solution here is that "Severe Lacerations" was the intended outro track, so they swapped its position with "Surgical Reanimation" and called it a day.

I digress about that not merely because it is amusing, but because it illuminates (haha album title pun) a great deal about the level of effort put forth on this album, or rather the intentional lack thereof. This is antisocial music. I don't mean antisocial in the sense in which the word is typically used. I mean it in the sense that this music is anti-society, aggressively opposed to the concept of art and all of the qualities we typically associate with it. It sounds and appears as though it were created by a caveman with access to recording equipment and a drum machine.

And for that matter, I don't care what any of the credits for this album state. The drums are transparently, obviously programmed. As with seemingly every brutal death band with a drum machine, the artificial nature of the drums is inevitably exposed due to the band either lacking good judgment about programming it to replicate something achievable by a human or simply not caring about verisimilitude at all. From the opening seconds of the album, the kick drums rumble almost constantly underneath everything at a relentless, inhumanly fast pace. With the exception of the blast beat sections, the double bass rolls like a machine gun at something I would like to say approaches 500 bpm. I would describe it as straight thirty-secondth notes, except that it is far too fast to be able to discern its subdivision in relation to the tempo of everything else happening around it. It resembles a constant drum roll behind everything else in the mix, buzzing perpetually as background noise.

And let me not mince words about the mixing - it is shit. In my mind, the single most mystifying production decision one can make in the world of heavy metal is to place the guitars too low in the mix, and that's exactly what happened here. As per industry standard the bass is inaudible even if it is allegedly present, but the guitars are only a few notches above the bass, occupying a place on the volume scale somewhere above the endless kick drums but far beneath the vocals and the snare. To discern what the guitars were doing, I listened to this album with high-quality noise cancelling headphones, and they were still a muddy mess the majority of the time. Even with the best noise isolation achievable, it was still difficult to determine what the guitars were doing. They are detuned to the point of being functionally atonal. There are only a handful of moments on the album when the riffs demonstrate any variation in pitch whatsoever that is achieved through any technique other than pinch harmonics. The riffs come in roughly three flavors: slow stop-and-go slam chugs, riffs that follow blast beats exactly in time, and walls of indiscernible noise. There are few deviations from this throughout the album's runtime, just enough to remind the listener that they are alive and have not somehow slipped from consciousness into some hellish dimension of unceasing static and gurgling.

If you have not heard this album, the vocals are are exactly what you think they are. While not the most overt example of it, this album is firmly in the camp of pig squeal vocals, and it is always the album I refer the uninitiated to when I refer to "breecore." I don't care what sort of Demilich-inspired affirmation this album shipped with swearing that the vocals were not modified in any way, nor am I going to lie to you and pretend that I have actually examined a physical copy of it. At best, the vocals are all inhales. More likely, pitch modulation was involved, which greatly enhances how utterly inhuman it all sounds at the expense of credulity. To produce similar sounds on your own, merely take a recording of yourself grunting into a microphone, open it up in any free, widely-available audio editing program, stretch the recording to double its original length, then recompress it back to its original length such that it is functionally playing its half-speed pitch in real time. You'll be amazed by the similarity your five-minute effort bears to the real thing.

The trouble with describing and rating this album lies in that despite its obvious and objectively detestable nature, those same qualities which make it so thoroughly repugnant also lend it a bizarre sort of charm. In a way, this album's self-demonstrating contempt for song structure, musicianship, and acceptable production make it into something that transcends art. Whatever art is, this is the opposite of it, yet paradoxically is therefore also some kind of art. I'm not going to attempt to determine its inherent worth as an artistic endeavor, as that evaluation is purely the responsibility of the beholder. In the same sense that Tommy Wiseau's The Room is clearly one of the worst films ever made, this is clearly one of the worst albums in the history of heavy metal. However, much like The Room, this album is so hyperbolic in its awfulness that it becomes challenging if not impossible to assign a proper rating to it. Worthless and repugnant by its own merits, its negative qualities are so exaggerated that they can become positive ones in the eye of the right beholder. Therefore, I abandon all pretense of trying to give this album a real score and instead assign it a meme number.

(Nice.)

Immature as that is, I find it appropriate given that it is difficult to determine the level of seriousness with which Enmity crafted this release. It boggles the mind to think that the creators of this album did not know what they were doing. This is not merely amateurish - it's actively bad in ways which seem impossible to have achieved without some forethought. This music takes all of the cliches of brutal death metal and runs away with them. It vacillates between being aggressively mediocre and captivatingly awful depending on one's perspective and mood, the time of day, the season, the alignment of the planets, etc. On the surface level, it's so generically morbid and uninteresting that it seems like it could never warrant much of a reaction - the cover art is some indeterminate gory scene, the song titles are all bluntly graphic, and the whole thing buzzes in one ear and out the other without ever presenting the listener with anything that would inspire them to listen to it again. And then, one day, you recall a particularly bad album you listened to a long time ago, and your memories of it barely seem real, and you listen to it again just to be sure you remember it correctly. And with your new perspectives, and the wisdom afforded to you by years of new experiences and the passage of time, you find yourself simply blown away by how heinous it is, just absolutely repulsive on all possible levels.

And then maybe - just maybe - as your eyes slide out of focus and you lose yourself in the putrid slurry of the music and all the chaotic thoughts it inspires, it will begin to occur to you that you now understand even less than when it all started, and that everything you've just done has been a colossal waste of time.

I don't care about this thing being "the purest essence of death metal" or "one of the most brutal things ever released" since the first of these doesn't necessarily make it good music and the second is patently false since there are many brutal death metal albums out there that hit harder than this, go nastier than this, more punishing than this, and manage to do everything right that Illuminations of Vile Engorgement does wrong. If anything, this album should serve as an example of how not to make brutal death metal. If I could summarize this album in just one word, it would be "tedious" since tedium seems to be the entire objective of this thing rather than any form of aggression or brutality. It's a mess through and through and practically nothing works to produce anything resembling an immersive experience, musically or otherwise.

The most glaring problem with this album is probably because everything sounds like mushy, dull nonsense. The guitars sound like diarrhea, there's no getting around that. They are also overwhelmed by the drums which are firing on all cylinders throughout most of the album and they just end up making this thing feel like a big, flat mess with absolutely nothing on terms of momentum in the slightest. It also does not help at all that there seems to be no structure at all to this mess of guitar diarrhea and endless monotonous blast beats that do nothing but bore you to death. Then there's the production which turns the whole thing into a disgusting slurry of brown, tasteless gak that seems less like a bone-chewing beast that's going to rip you to pieces and more like a beleaguered creature dying from its several impacted colons rupturing all at once. Add in the pig-squeal vocals that have no variance as well as no strength or coordination to them, and the individual performance aspects of this abortion are finally complete. It all sounds like garbage.

Then we get on to the fact that ninety percent of this album sounds the same and none of that sounds good. You were expecting maybe a riff, or some good grooves for violence? Too bad! Every song except the very last one sounds the same, with an endless barrage of indistinguishable blast beats and guitar notes that don't resemble anything even close to a riff being blasted at you like shit in a wind tunnel. It never lets up and it never sounds particularly powerful, crushing, or even horrifying, it just sounds dull. The only time it does let up is for these brief slam sections that have no punch or gravity to them, so it just trades one boring thing for another. There is no structure to this thing at all, it's just the same dull pig-squealing, blasting, and limp sloppy guitars being played in a way that seems brutal, but has no merit calling itself such. The final track does change things up with it being a Spanish-style acoustic piece that actually has some finesse to its guitar-play. This shows these guys had talent, which makes me wonder why in Hell's sewers did these guys use none of that talent for the rest of the album. That's just enraging when you realize someone can do something good, but they instead choose to deliver a bunch of thoughtless, lazy crap that consists of almost nothing but endless repetition.

On top of being one of the weakest and sloppiest brutal death metal albums out there, Illuminations of Vile Engorgement is also deliberately lazy and does nothing at all to engage the listener. Boredom and tedium are the names of the game here. This is pure, unemotional, unfeeling, un-aggressive, un-interesting slop that hardly changes at almost all points throughout. It's not impressive once you see through all the walls of drums and the limp production. There's no motion or energy to this, it's just plodding lethargy, monotony, and boredom disguised as face-ripping, gore-soaked brutality. Enmity does nothing for brutal death metal aside from putting all its bad qualities on display and cranking them up 'til the dial breaks off, all while creating an amorphous blob of dragging metallic dullness out of them. I bet even if this monotonous garbage had a decent production with some punch to it, this would still sound like an incoherent mess since almost nothing changes rhythmically, tempo-wise, pitch-wise, or overall. This album is a drain on the listener simply from how boring, listless, and mind-numbing it is throughout. Do yourself a favor, listen to something else.

First things first, no, this isn't the most brutal thing ever; plenty of late 80s/early 90s death metal bands have been making far more intense music before this was created. Hell, even modern tech bands are far more intense than this album could ever hope to be. Loudest? Sure, but then again, I'd listen to a jackhammer at a construction site if I wanted something noisy.

One of the first things you'll notice is that all the songs sound alike, and this isn't just me not being able to discern which song is which. I quite literally mean ALL THE SONGS aside from two tracks, one being a misplace intro and an awkward outro, sound alike. Subtract those two tracks and it may as well just be one very long song that goes nowhere because of said problem when all of the tracks sound alike.

Is the songwriting any good? NO. The general song structure goes like this: Have the guitarist hit the same notes over and over again while having a drummer blast as fast as possible with the comical sound of a pig getting castrated being looped over. I kid you not, that's all that's going on in almost all of their songs besides the two tracks that I mentioned earlier. The former is a generic ambient track while the latter is a hilarious sound of someone plucking a few random strings on a cheap acoustic guitar.

Riffs are nonexistent beyond the one note that is being repeated over and over again. This is bad because if you aren't going for a technical sound, you should at least make a variety of riffs, which this band fails at. When did strumming the same string become brutal? The hilariously muddy guitar tone doesn't help either. So either way, it sounds mechanically flat. There isn't any bass either. If there is, it's just following the awfulness of the guitars, so no surprise there.

Blasting isn't brutal either when it's just playing fast for the sake of it without any sense of rhythm. Heck, the drumming might sound too mechanical to be real. Sadder because it doesn't follow the pattern of the riffs and just does its own thing.

And as for the vocals...pigs aren't scary. I don't know where people get this silly idea that a funny animal would be more brutal as opposed to a deep booming grunt. Waking The Cadaver wasn't brutal when they did it, neither the fuck is this band. Vocals need more than a disjointed sound. They need POWER BEHIND them. Kronos's vocalists are far more impressive despite not aiming to be as "br00tal" as possible. Don't bother trying to grab a lyric sheet because there aren't any, not that you'd expect anything other than the generic gore stuff that's been overdone to death.

I'll just go ahead and say it: This is laughable at best and cringe-worthy at worst. Now if you excuse me, I'm going to go listen to smart music for smart people like Origin or Atheist, bands that are actually talented and where they actually play their instruments .

Sometimes you just gotta take a break from reviewing all the good music that you find. So thank you for making my day Enmity, you've given me a chance to dish out another serving of 0% that hasn't been used in a while. But seriously, this might even be worse than Waking the Cadaver. It's absolutely awful, and I'd rather listen to the One Direction fans crying than this.

First things first, I think there's a slight issue with the ordering of the songs. You see, the introduction tends to be at the start, yet on Illuminations of Vile Engorgement it doesn't come in until the fifth track, halfway across the album. By that point you kind of know what you're in for, assuming that you can listen to it for that long. But on the plus side, at least that is one of the two tracks that doesn't sound exactly like the ones immediately before and after it. Yes, because I actually have no idea where one 'song' stops and the next starts. It's just a horribly repeated mess.

So... brutal death metal. Need I say any more? It's very much a love-it-or-hate-it thing, and I fall firmly on the side of hating it. To me it just sounds like one big dollop of shite. Here, the guitars are so down-tuned that I think whales would have trouble noticing it, and they're not particularly pleasant either. It's just chug after chug after chug after chug separated only by long periods of nothing and the occasional breakdown. Deathcore, anyone? But that isn't even the worst part, because the drumming is an irritatingly fast snare hit for the most part that sounds like it has come straight from the world of grindcore. Aside from that, the only part of the drum in use is the double bass, which is constantly running at a ridiculous pace. Basically, the drums serve no real purpose and I think the only reason that they're there is because the guitar has so many unplugged gaps to fill.

But of course we need to be more hardcore than what has been described above, so we add the lowest vocals in the history of mankind into the mix. No, not really, they're just weird burps that sound like very low pig squeals. They are annoying as fuck. Nothing is intelligible (because it's brutal, that's how it's meant to be, duh), and in all honesty the band just gives the impression of stupidity. I don't want to listen to a deranged pig, that's not what I define as music. That's not what anyone defines as music. Plus, they don't even sound that brutal. Johan Hegg sounds more impressive doing regular growls.

Do you know what saddens me about this? The band are trying so hard to be brutal, and yet they don't even achieve that. There are a million bands that sound more brutal simply because what they play has a thundering depth to it that drives their music home, whereas this is just one-dimensional and fairly weak. Do you know what that makes this? That's right, a pointless existence that will only appeal to a very small proportion of people, and the only purpose this album serves is for assholes like me to poke fun at. You don't even have to listen to the whole album to understand what you're getting here, a minute or two will sum everything else up. Not that I'd recommend you listen to this at all.

I heard a lot of things about Enmity. People either like or hate this band with no comments ever wandering in between the realm of the two. While the band has earlier and later releases, this is the album that always seems to grab everyone's attention the most. And if you listen to the album, you can see why. It's not a typical metal album. I mean hell, this is a very awkward release just for music in general. And for all intents and purposes, it rides the line between whitenoise and extreme metal so hard to the point where the line is stretched and thinned so much that sometimes you question if Enmity are even playing music at all.

If I could (attempt) to say anything about Illuminations of Vile Engorgement, I suppose the only real thing that could be said is that the only reason why this album has such a weird array of praise to negativity is mainly because well... it's brutal and not much else. It's a big slop of sound through in and through out. The album is so genuine in just being heavy without even giving any real focus or question as to if the listener is bored beyond reason or would much rather blast a shotgun shell through his skull before the album's closure. The only thing that truly sets away the next noise that conjuncts to the next is mainly just from the occasional slam (breakdown) in the album. The slams are fun albeit they're catchy, but it's the only reason I believe why I don't just hate this waste of plastic of an album. This album is not death metal just in its focus to be heavy and nothing more. This is death metal in its most laziest form possible. I forgot to mention one thing about the slams; when they're played, they barely sound any different from the last slam played 2 songs before. What's the point if that's the only redeeming thing? Go listen to a real slam album (anything by Epicardiectomy, Cerebral Incubation, Cephalotripsy...) than waste time on this.

Moving onto the riffs, they're all just tremolo up and down on the same fret usually outlasting the entire song until they figure it's time to move onto separating that same riff into the following song. Not that the riffs really matter, you'll barely hear anything this Arizona two piece is playing buried underneath the fog of vocals and extremely loud drums. The album follows this formula for nine tracks of the eleven total that make up this entire jamboree. Two tracks of which one is a forgettable interlude, and the other being an actually worthwhile outro that I will get to in a little bit. But first, let's talk some more about how mindbogglingly repetitive all this is. It's almost as if their guitarist was unable to play past four different riffs or even was capable of retaining a memory past being able to play four different riffs. Those freaking vocals too, man. They're the most annoying thing. He sounds like he's gurgling a choking dose of vodka in a big jacuzzi with the water jets turned on full blast. The vocals almost never stop and they sound to be double tracked in a lot of places which make it even worse. They nearly sound like goregrind vocals have it be the lack of special effects that goregrind vocals usually use.

Drums are horribly mixed. While the bass drum is just right, the snare is way too loud. When the snare is played, the guitar is about as audible as one of those mosquito ringtone things. The guitar is only to be heard when a slam is played granted there's enough chunk and meat on the riffs backed with the fact that only the bass drum is played during the slams on this album. It's probably the only worthwhile moments a typical death metal fan would have within this enormous slop of sound. As for bass guitar, hahahaha. Don't even ask (no, you can't hear it).

Now, this review may seem very negative based on the array of words that you've already read. But there's a reason why I don't fully hate this record... there's a reason that exists in me that for some reason keeps me away from fully shamming it. And that reason is because, well I like this kind of music, but this is absolutely not the right way to do it nor the completely wrong way. Yes, I think this album is shit, but there's a small part of captivation about it that remotely keeps it away from me completing just chucking it off as something I never want my ears exposed to again. As I write this, this is about my fourth time listening to it. Listening to this album is like having a canker sore on the inside of your cheek. You know you should stop poking it with your tongue, but you can't stop. That's how it is for me. This album is like white noise; all songs blend in to each other at such an insane rate to where nothing barely even stands out unless it's one of the two instrumental songs or the occasional slam the band like to play.

Speaking of which, the final track is an instrumental piece played on acoustic guitar. Beautiful ending put to the end of a heavy record. Almost seems out of place, but let alone it's probably my favorite song on the entire release. Ironic?

In my reviews, I usually end the last sentence with a big recommendation on who would like this album. But I can't this time, Enmity are a really weird band. I couldn't imagine recommending this album to anyone and have it somehow not lead to a regret later on down the line. I can only suggest that you listen to this record and just ask yourself if you like what you hear.

For an album that's considered polarizing, I'm astounded as to just how neutral I am towards the whole thing. It's certainly not the worst death metal I've heard but then again it's not the best either. It just sort of exists in this death metal limbo where nothing really happens. Enmity are certainly unflinchingly brutal, probably the heaviest band I've thus far come across, but shit I'd be lying if I said this was interesting or entertaining, it's just kind of there.

If you're on the bands page I'm going to assume you have a basic idea of what Enmity sounds like. Ultra distorted death metal with very little riffs broken apart by breakdowns whilst a vocalist delivers a constant pig squeal. Yeah it's certainly brutal as hell and there's no melody on display here. Guitars just play constant grinding whilst the drums are constantly blasting even during the breakdowns. Brutality for brutalities sake is what Enmity has aimed for and they've certainly delivered, but apart from that, nothing happens.

I'm being serious, for an album that's supposedly the heaviest thing of all time I'm surprised at just how static the whole affair is. If you can get past the production then you'll realize the guitars are solely comprised of chugging riffs. Despite the fast nature of the record it's ludicrously simple. There's no variety between tracks, nothing really to break it up with the exception of that useless ambient interlude halfway through.

I find it strange actually, there's nothing really to enjoy about Illuminations of Vile Engorgement but I can't find anything to complain about it either. It's just sort of there, it doesn't really piss me off or annoy me or anything, I'm just kind of like "this is sort of cool...I guess." It's certainly the emptiest death metal I've heard, probably the album closest to the genres general aesthetics. The band has created something very close to the alien, inhospitable nature of death itself. Whilst other death metal bands offered at the very least some semblance of humanity, Enmity offer up something monochrome and bleak.

Due to the strange nature of this album it's probably been the hardest review I've had to write. Enmity don't really offer an album to be enjoyed, rather, this is more of an experience. Illuminations of Vile Engorgement is certainly more about the aura the music creates than the actual music itself. The instrumentation seems to be second to the atmosphere the band was aiming for. There's no real musical direction on here, no real riffs. I might have heard a solo, I think, and the ambient interlude does help to break up the endless, monotonous blasting, but apart from that it's very still, static music that doesn't really go anywhere.

I think I like the idea of the album a whole lot more than the end result, I respect the bands efforts to take death metal to its logical extreme and the brutality is certainly something to behold. But apart from the obvious, this is just a really uninteresting, lifeless album that strives for nothing except sheer brutality. For some people this would be a ringing endorsement, but for me, I don't really see a point.

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.

I pulled this album up for my cat, Oscar, tonight, and I'll be honest, he wasn't too pleased. In fact, he ran across the room and attempted to break out in sheer horror of the music's enormous dildo of brutality. I'll be honest, it was quite humorous. Though Oscar's ears are virgin when concerning the majesty of heavy metal, I can't help but wonder why this music is so offensive to my feline friend? Hmmmm...could it be because the relationship between riff and structure is unbalanced and awkward in it's execution? Uhhh...could it be because the general aesthetics of the album are generic and sub-standard when concerning the style? Or could it be because he's a fucking cat who's ears are literally not designed to take in music of the volume I provided? No...that's impossible. I played him some Rainbow earlier and he seemed rather docile, it must be something else...

I've never really thought about what kind of cat Oscar is. Is he a rebellious punk? Is he a ravin' rivethead? Is he a crusty cruster? I've had Oscar for quite awhile, and my bet's on the third option because he smells awful, has an extremely knotted mane, and spends most of his time outside begging for food. But is it possible that my cat, my beloved Oscar, is actually a heavy metal purist disguised as a friendly, frisky feline? Have I had a glimpse into his true soul...is all I knew about Oscar merely a delusion intended to sway me into delivering food unto his belly? I may never know, but I believe he's trying to tell me something...

The way he licks those paws...ah! According to him...the riffs are generic, directionless garbage weakly pasted over equally dull and boring blast-beats and insipid diarrhea farts. Hmm, an interesting conclusion. He also claims...the breakdowns add nothing to the end product and serve simply as a place-marker for how much more generic and brainless the band is capable of becoming in a 10-second radius without submitting to any degree of artistic or intellectual enlightenment. Furthermore, according to this fucking cat, the music is a bland, monotonous train-wreck designed to appeal to insecure slam-hipsters concerned only with the superficial brutality of the music as opposed to it's legitimate quality. He would would pin-point examples, but it's rather hard when very few moments of this album can be discerned or enjoyed on a rational level...beyond delusional nonsense. The closing track, "Severe Lacerations", which is a flamenco-acoustic piece, contains some mildly entertaining ideas, though it feels fake and was obviously tagged on as a failed bid at legitimacy...

Well...it would appear my beloved Oscar is indeed a rather outspoken individual! It is possible this fucking cat just doesn't understand, that this music is supposed to sound like the band put no effort into the music! This is what makes it brutal! This music is so monotonous and utterly devoid of all thought and purpose that somehow it's...I don't know...good! Oh, but alas, Oscar speaks once more...meow...meow...hmmm, either this cat wants to be fed, or is trying to tell me that what I just said was literally completely laughable. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess he's referring to the latter, once again. Always the latter with this cat. Anyway, I think he's trying to tell me that the conclusion of "it's so monotonous and muddy that it's brutal" is completely ridiculous...like explaining that Herman Cain's political candidacy is pure genius...and apparently any praise of this album is supplied through over-analysation...ignoring the elephant in the room, which in this case is that the music actually completely sucks. It's like getting a dog turd in your taco at the local Taco Bell, and saying, "well, there might be a dog turd in this, but in a way that dog turd makes this taco more gritty, unrefined, and down-right evil!". I'll be honest, I've tried to read and take seriously viewpoints like some people have made, such as "you can't criticize this because it's what makes it bad is actually good" or "this band has seen into the utter depths of hell and is channeling their sights through soulless brutality"...but it's all just laughable nonsense. This is just bad music. It's literally nothing more. Oscar, kudos to you, good sir, for enlightening me!

Above all else, what alarms me most about this release is how unnoteworthy it all adds up to being. There is not one single memorable guitar riff. Not one single drum fill that adds anything to the music. Not so much as a single guttural burp that might change the pace of the music into going in any notable direction, and I don't know about you, but if people are calling this directionless trash "brutal", then death metal has officially "jumped the shark", and I might as well jump off the train now before people start to listen to literally complete fucking static and call it "enlightening". Now is the time to dust off our old King Crimson albums and listen to something a bit more substantial. Something with a purpose, something with a goal. Hell, you may even find yourself listening to Brodequin's "Festivals of Death" CD, which is more or less in the same general style as this, yet more refined and with a direction (plus, stronger vocals and the riffs are audible as well as more substantial). Just don't jump on the bandwagon, with all the hipsters, and call this pure crap "genius", because it's not. It's a joke and it makes me sad to think that there are people who think this is legitimate death metal. I would also like to point out that the guitar tone sounds nothing like the traditional "Swedeath buzzsaw" guitar tone, and no one who make this assessment could possibly know what they were talking about.


My cat and I disagree on many things. He, for instance, likes to claw at my legs when I try to walk away after petting him. He also loves to dig his claws into whatever he's standing on when someone tries to pick him up...and let's not forget how cruel and heartless he acted towards our cat of 17 years, the late Cally (R.I.P.). But I digress, we agree on this. Enmity's music is silly, boring, and completely and utterly unthreatening. If you like brutal death metal, go pick up Brodequin's "Instruments of Torture", or Mortician's "Mortal Massacre" EP. I don't see much relevance or use for this, though. It's merely a weak, poorly thought out mess of notes that has no meaning of use to anyone, save for the silly hipsters who cherish it so. If you want to listen to this, go right ahead and do that. But just know that Oscar, and I, completely hate you for it.

(Edit - August 8th, 2011: Yes, I've changed my opinion on yet another album. Hence, another rewrite from scratch.)

Well isn't this a special little release we have here. Brutal death metal band Enmity did what only the insane would try to do - they looked at what Torsofuck were doing, with their chuggy slams and relentless blast passages, and said "How can we dumb this down even further?" And so they have. This is literally some of the filthiest music I've ever heard. It practically oozes. And yet, it's great. Against all odds, Enmity succeeded at creating something great. Through rather unorthodox means, yes, but they did it. See, Enmity did not do what most bands do when writing music, which is look at a musical concept, study said concept and then try to improve on it in their own way. No, Enmity have taken a concept (in this case, brutal death metal, mostly) and then pushed that concept so far out of acceptable realms that it not only borders on atonality, it is impossible as hell to criticize. Beyond a musical value, there is obviously a meaning of some sort to be gathered from this work. To people who don't like this album, that meaning might be the the fact thaat Enmity is the worst band on Earth. But there's something else, something beyond pure musical worth, to be found in the sludge that is Illuminations of Vile Engorgement.

I remember stating in the past that this release was nothing but pure noise, and I realize now that that was a ridiculous and asinine statement. As much as someone unfamiliar with the genre might say otherwise, this release not only has rhythm (the slams are pretty damn catchy, I must admit), it even has hints of melody. Hell, there's even a hint of a clear, unchugged riff around halfway through "Rotten Divinity". Sounds like I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but this is a lot more praise than I gave the album last time around. The guitar tracks, which sound like they were recorded in a basement, typically alternate between slow chugs and medium chugs, regardless of whether or not the drum machine is blasting. Hell, they even have a slight hint of that buzzsaw guitar tone commonly used by Swedish death metal bands, and though its presence is probably due to amateurism, it fits the cacophony that Enmity's release as a whole piles into. The vocals are all a guttural mess of pig slurry, and they're a nearly constant force on the music, which of course simply adds to the mess.

The songs themselves typically alternate between constant blasting at approximately the same pace and then short bursts of chugging formed into slams. If this was some normal old brutal death metal band, I probably wouldn't care, or I would write this off as simply writing crappy songs. But the sludgy, heavy mess of a guitar tone mixed with the constant gurgling mixed with the relentlessness of the whole mix... it all fits together. I also must commend this band for managing to keep up momentum in their songs: whether it be a slam or a blast, these guys always carry a nice buildup, and release it at the perfect time. There's also a song out of place on this release: "Severe Lacerations". It's a flamenco track, and though it's not great (but I'm sure anyone who was listening to this release for relentless brutal death metal would say the same thing), it provides a nice alibi should someone charge the members of Enmity with mental retardation.

Illuminations of Vile Engorgement is near-impossible for me to criticize as a reviewer, because like Khanate, the pleasure in this music comes in the form of displeasure, and it's hard to draw a line between what's simply a flaw and what's an intended element of the band. I suppose in that case that my score for the album is mostly arbitrary, but I will say the guitar tone could be a bit louder and a slight bit crunchier in the mix to give it an extra "oomph". Like Last Days of Humanity, this is not a band I'll probably end up listening to often. But it does what it sets out to do near-perfectly. It is the full embodiment of rage, anger, and chaos that death metal was meant to be from the start. It cuts away the technicality, the melody, the catchiness - it throws all standards for the genre out the window, and forces the listener to experience the music on its own terms. Its own crude, repulsive terms. Even when it is reviled, it's doing exactly what its creators intended it to - causing unrefined disgust. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Enmity: evil in its rawest form.

Death metal since day one has been a thoroughly unfriendly genre. Black metal for all of its aspirations as the most extreme of metal styles has a vague feeling of escapism behind it -whether supernatural or in some misty dew-scented forest- and while doom is full of dire prophesies and hopeless, dreary death marches it lacks the immediate, violent, crushing end that death metal promises. No chance of escape, no hope of redemption or triumph via Satan or whatever, no sunset lit vistas near your end, no icey dragontowers or what have you, just blackness followed by oblivion. The end, death, etc.

Thus, it's not much of a surprise that I consider this album to be the peak of the genre; at the very least very close to it. Not the most enjoyable dm album I own, by a long shot, but certainly the most pure, the album closest to the source. An album as pure and sure as oblivion, an album as black, as alien and as incomprehensible as death. No concessions, no one spared, this isn't music (is it music?) to enrich the soul, this isn't a harsh listen that scourges the body and clears the mind, this is as close to an approximation of death as you'd get.

I love the way that Enmity have assembled the sonics of this album; for one thing, this is as close to the most technical, mind bending music you'll ever hear (various calls about the instruments not playing in time, not playing in a time signature (is that possible?) are laughable, at best), but by the same token the music itself has been stripped back to it's most bare, degraded components; a guitar that does little but produce horrible skronks and chunk sounds with absolutely no melody whatsoever, whilst the drummer spends his time in weirdo slam territory when he's not blasting out equally wrong sounding, er, blasts. One thing is certain- they both know exactly what they're doing, even though we the listeners are unlikely to understand. I'm not the first reviewer to say this, and I won't be the last- the lack of concessions, the lack of anything that could be called "normal music" or even "normal brutal death metal" is rather stunning. I don't think this album requires much BDM experience, but moreso the ability to appreciate extremity for its own sake- what else is this an expression of, after all?

Don't be fooled though; single minded as this is it sure as shit isn't a gimmick. After a few songs what is initially a fun, interesting novelty listen becomes something else entirely. No, the subtleties don't make themselves apparent as there aren't any. The atmosphere, the vision does, though; it doesn't take too long to realize that Enmity aren't going for catchiness, or for heaviness in a traditional sense, really; just sheer, utter, unblinking brutality; permanent death, eternal oblivion, etc, and damn does it work. It'd be interesting to see if their other releases are of a similar standard; previous attempts at gazing, staring into the void (from Reign in Blood to Seven Churches to Wold's Screech Owl) are rarely matched with follow up records. And Enmity have looked into the abyss like few have previously; you won't find many doom records as dark, as many black metal records that remain as unflinchingly misanthropic.

Yes, this is an atmospheric masterpiece that's worth hearing by everyone as the high point of death metal artistry, as the most extreme record yet released- 5 years and running, which I find quite a staggering achievement. Not hugely enjoyable, but a massive step forward for the death metal genre, and for music as a whole. That it's essential listening is unquestionable. Only death is real!

At the risk of sounding redundant, I'll take a pass on doing the whole spiel about how this is a love it or hate it album and how "ya either get it or ya don't get it" because, well, take a look at the scores. Do I really have to say it? The way I interpret album reviews is not by the score, but by the text. It seems obvious, but music is so subjective that reading about the characteristics of an album is significantly more telling than reading someone else's opinion regarding said characteristics. For an example with respect to my personal tastes, if I read a (hypothetical) 0% review in which the author remarked that the music s/he heard was naught but "stupidly simple slams with no melody whatsoever" and that the singer sounded like he was "puking into the microphone invariably" and concluding with an advisement to avoid, I would do anything but. In fact, I would be chomping at the bit to hear this album! With that being said, you can forget about reading a rant hereforth, as I'm going to simply elucidate the music of Illuminations of Vile Engorgement and ponder the whys and wherefores concerning my enjoyment of such. From this, you can decide for yourself whether or not perusing or pursuing this controversial album would be in your interest.

An opener like "Bloated Slabs" is flat out rude. It has no consideration for more sensitive listeners who aren't ready for this kind of onslaught. The track begins as if it were mid song, sans a sample, sans an expository riff, sans anything, really. It just assaults you from the get go. The first slam of the album comes exactly five seconds into the song. Yeah, five seconds. An opener like this is analogous to breaking a fay virgin in by ramming it into her asshole with no warning... or lube. Personally, this is what I feel death metal should be. That is, malevolent, sadistic, brutal, and it doesn't dick around with synthetic (in some cases, synthesized) pleasantries for the purpose of accessibility. Clearly, Enmity is not concerned with being accessible. If a band like Deeds of Flesh is like a wheelchair ramp to get into death metal, Enmity is like a rickety rope bridge over a flame engulfed canyon with punji sticks at the bottom of it. Be wary, there's a fire breathing dragon awaiting you should you choose to cross over.

I'm not going to lie and say that the riffs on this album are anywhere near discernable. On the contrary, the guitar playing on Illuminations of Vile Engorgement has only two functions: to pick rapidly and to chug. Ditto for the bass performance. Can it be that it was always so simple? Not quite. Enmity can pull this off only because it fits their aesthetic. That aesthetic is, in a word, ugliness. And let's not kid ourselves, ugliness has been the metier of death metal ever since Possessed buttfucked the scene with Seven Churches back in '85, so that's nothing new. It's just been a while since I've heard it pushed to such extremes, or rather, done so goddamned effectively. Case in point, on any other album, Enmity's brand of celeritous, unceasingly bludgeoning drum work would be a crux. Yet, on Illuminations of Vile Engorgement, a crutch becomes a contribution, as the rancorous drumming only heightens the hideousness.

The vocals? Grotesque, as promised. What I enjoy about them in particular is the fact that they don't sound human. I mean, like, literally, the sounds eminating from this man's throat have no business doing so. I've seen them classified as pig squeals, but I must run counter to this, for the most part. To me, the vocals are difficult to typecast, because they're kind of like a hybrid between a gurgle and a squeal. Shoot, that's like crossbreeding orcs and goblins, two ugly ass constituents in and of themselves, to create uruk-hai, an aberration that's even moreso objectionable. Is the vocal performance any good? Well, maybe not in the technical sense, but without them, this album would be stripped of its atmosphere. Said atmosphere lies not exclusively in the technique of the vocalist, but also in the way they're produced on the album. They sound, for lack of a better term, distant. I don't mean "distant" in the way vocals are produced in bedroom black metal projects, but more as if there's a feeling of dread, as in you sense that the source of these monstrous caterwauls is drawing closer... closer... closer yet. Really, it sounds as though you're listening through a sewer, and Enmity's vocals is what you're hearing (kind of like that little boy in the movie IT, remember?). C'mon now, what says "brutal death metal" more than guttural emissions from a sewer monster that's coming to fuckin' kill you? Listen to the vocals over the slams in "Facial Carvings", "Hacksaw Spinal Butchery" or "Rotted Divinity", close your eyes, and use your imagination... you'll see what I mean. Undoubtedly, Rob Weber's vocals is what makes Enmity Enmity.

My complaints are few. Most notably is that aside from "Intro" and "Severe Lacerations", neither of which are death metal songs, every track begins in the same manner. Every single song starts blasting and gurgling as soon as you press play. This is vexing, as the songwriting is quite solid elsewhere. It's just that none of the songs introduce themselves in a memorable fashion. The track "Intro" could have been dispensed with entirely. While not a terrible little cacophony, it has no call to be on the album, since the atmosphere is there without it. I'm not sure how I feel about "Severe Lacerations", nor do I know why a flamenco piece was tacked onto this album in the first place. It's a pretty composition and it's played well, but I get the suspicion that its existence is merely a means to wink at the listener, so to speak, saying "we could do this if we wanted to". If that's the case, then it absolutely qualifies as showing off, and such is contradictory to the album's motif. It's not too big a deal, though.

For me, Illuminations of Vile Engorgement isn't just another death metal album, it's an album that represents death metal the way it's meant to be. This is the music I love, made the way I want it. Sadly, there isn't a lot of this about anymore, for many contemporary death metal acts simply thrive on their brutality and/or musicianship whilst forgetting the key ingredient to the genre: Hatred. This is a band that has it down, and Enmity does well to live up to the definition of their name. I don't fuck around and I don't mince words, Illuminations of Vile Engorgement is a death metal masterpiece.

The fact that this record receives so much hate from the death metal scene at large means a couple things: one, that it's assuredly one of the best death metal records ever released, and two, that the death metal scene's priorities are far out of whack. I mean, logically, if you're listening to death metal for the right reasons (those being its brutality and animosity towards... well, everything), then this album, which entirely eschews things like 'melody' and 'structure' should be basically flawless, right? Actually, maybe the truth is something a little more painful for the scene: Enmity is actually TOO BRUTAL for death metal fans, who would be better off listening to, say, Yanni or Obituary or some other pop music like that. The cool people will be over here listening to this, rewinding over and over again because they thought they might have heard an actual riff on 'Hacksaw Spinal Butchery'.

If you're reading this review, you're certainly clued in to what Enmity sounds like, though I'm not sure the written word properly communicates just how brutal this record manages to be. The closest approximation would be Last Days Of Humanity's seminal 'Putrefaction In Progress', were you to replace the frantic, gnawing nature of that release with a dismal, mechanical delivery ala early Fleshgrind. This is obscenely brutal: rhythmically, the band operates only in blast or bizarre, offtime slam, and melodically, well, there's nothing present. I'm entirely sure that the guitar on this release is composed of actual riffs but I've never heard a production job which is able to more fully strip away the tonal properties of an ostensibly melodic instrument. You listen to the guitars and you can hear the pitch moving up and down, but no actual NOTES come out the other side. Tabbing this album would be quite literally impossible simply because there's no way you could replicate the sound of the instrument accurately enough for your playing to actually sound like it. The vocals are basically a Wormed-style wet slurring noise. If the lyrics are broken up into actual words, I'm not able to tell.

Clearly the members of this band are masters of their instruments; it's difficult to tell if they're doing what they're doing correctly, but they manage to do it the same way over and over again, so clearly they have their shit together. This sort of goes for the rest of the music as well; it's almost impossible to tell if what's going on is the way it's supposed to be, but it was released on a record label and apparently met the band's approval, so I suppose one has to suspend their disbelief that this was their ultimate vision. There's nothing redeeming about this record: you either appreciate it for what it is, a pure monolith of insane brutality, or you hate it for the same reason. At least what it is isn't in debate; everyone appears to basically acknowledge that this is one of (if not the) most brutal records to date. The question is whether you'll listen to it for that reason alone, to be repeatedly confronted by the sheer unspeakable brutality that this album is composed of.

I've listened to this probably twenty times and I'm still not sure if I'm any closer to understanding it than I was at the beginning, but I do know that I absolutely love it. Then again, I think brutality for brutality's sake is one of the most legitimate goals a death metal record can have. This is essentially the 'Butchered At Birth' of a new generation, and if you can appreciate stuff like this, you owe it to yourself and to the retarded geniuses who somehow composed this monstrosity to hear it.

(As a quick addendum: to anyone who thinks the guys behind this are just cavemen, give 'Severe Lacerations' a quick listen. An experimental acoustic guitar piece influenced by flamenco, jazz, and perhaps the atonal, experimental works of guitarists like Fred Frith? They know what they're doing more than you ever will.)

Perhaps you think death metal is becoming too focused on trying to be as brutal as possible, at the expense of proper riffing and songwriting and catchiness? Well, here's what Enmity have to say on the subject, according to an interview:

“We believe that death metal is all about extreme brutality, and is the sole reason for it's existence. Therefore the sicker the better.”

So these guys are looking at bands like Disgorge, Devourment, and the other Disgorge and thinking to themselves: you know, that's not bad, but it could be a bit more brutal and possibly a little more sick. Now, it's not like those bands are totally lacking in brutality and sickness – they're more brutal and sick than, say, Enya or the Bee Gees – but they're not quite as brutal or as sick as they could be. And so Enmity have set about to ameliorate this deficiency. The guitarist does what he can do obscure the fact that he's playing an instrument designed for the decidedly un-brutal purpose of playing notes and chords. Instead, we hear a lot of chunk-chunk sounds, some whirring, buzzes, squeals... and from the drummer, a whole lot of blast beats.

Arguably, this can be considered music. It might be one hell of an argument, though, depending on who you pick it with. Try explaining to a normal person why going “bleeeeaaaughghghg!” for half an hour can be construed as a vocal performance. I'm not sure if there are any lyrics. Not much point, since he's not saying them. Anyway, you'd best be seasoned going into this.

Have you ever stared at TV static? At first it looks totally random, but after a while you become hypnotized and you start to see little patterns in the fuzz. The little white specks look like little bees milling around one another. Bees do not randomly mill, you know. They have a plan.

I perceive some order to Enmity's music, and I'm pretty sure I'm not just hallucinating it. It's kind of technical with regards to the guitar work, and by that I mean that the horrible noises he's making are awkwardly-timed, and consistently so. It sounds made-up on the spot, or possibly an accident, but then he does the same thing again so you know it must not be. Don't expect much in the way of hooks and grooves.

Anyway, Enmity do a pretty good job of being Enmity, and I think they take what they're doing fairly seriously – just don't listen to this hoping for Morbid Angel or Bolt Thrower or even Suffocation. In a way, this is some of the weirdest music I've ever heard, even if it does all come out of brutal death metal stereotypes. I like to listen to it; not much use in trying to completely rationalize it.

I've been listening to Enmity for about a year now and over time this has become one of my favourite death metal albums. 'Illuminations of Vile Engorgement' is one of those albums that you can play at absolutely any time and it will be consistantly enjoyable throughout, yet it doesn't have any catchy choruses or hooky riffs to help it. It's a very strange brutal death metal album that you will not make linear sense of, at all. There are no memorable passages, nothing is really ear-pleasingly friendly and there is near enough no melody involved whatsoever. This is the next level of death metal.

Enmity play a very strange breed of death metal and it's not too suprising that they're not too popular because of it. You'll see it described in many reviews as severely brutal, the brutality end point in death metal, and you'll see many people passing this off as some sort of extremity gimmick where the band have pushed the boundaries too far and have no good ideas to back it up. It's true that the music is very brutal, but the detractors really seem to be missing how abstract and atmospheric this album is outside of that. Those elements are so strong infact, that the brutality aspects of the album almost take a back seat to these qualities. It's almost like they stumbled upon their unique sound completely by accident, aiming to be the absolute most brutal and conjuring up something absolutely genius aswell.

Here's what you'll find on 'Illuminations of Vile Engorgement': A guitar tuned dangerously low to the point of almost indecipherable noise. The guitar alternates between tight, convulated Suffocation-inspired riffing to slower slam breakdowns that would be impossible to slam dance to due to how uninvitingly cruel they are, and then of course there's blast mode where it's near impossible to make out what the guitar is playing at all. The bass is barely audible to my ears but when I turn up the bass all I get is this thick, lurking cloud of rumbling sound in the background. Call it a wall of sound if you will. The drums simply hammer away the whole time in a stupidly tight manner, played with such precise timing that they sound programmed. There are no fills (there is nothing the slightest bit human sounding about this album), just soulless blasting that ranges from fast to very fast and will occasionally slow down on the slower break sections, although sometimes the drums will just hammer away over the breakdowns too. The drumwork seems completely random at times. The drummer will blast over one riff, then play a little slower over the same riff, then go back to blasting but this time adding cymbal runs in the background. The subtleties are so strange and so delicately placed, it's truly a very weird album.

The vocalist seems to annoy most people, presumably because he's pretty loud in the mix and never seems to shut up. Also, he isn't doing any kind of real death metal growling, instead he gurgles and snorts inhumanely over the music at random times, not really following any sort of pattern or pacing. All of this seems like I'm criticising the album but this is definitely a positive review, I've simply never heard anything like this album before. The compositions are so weird, you can put this on at any time and it's thoroughly enjoyable the whole way through, it really is more than the sum of it's parts. I think it has something to do with the riffs, the 'melodies' (that's pushing it a bit) played are so strange and unlike anything else you'll really hear in any other band, yet they're both very subtle and very minimal, and when you're not paying attention and just have this on in the background you don't even notice them, you just hear this loud, constant hammering of the drums and this strange gurgly vocalist. But I think they reach you on a subconscious level, they flow from one to the other and craft these songs that are unlike near enough anything else in death metal. The music is completely unpredictable. Fast part leads to slow breakdown, which leads to chug, then faster part, then a different fast part. The drumming is very straight forward and simple yet keeps changing pace without any logical reason why, and when listening to this album it almost feels like you're listening to someone or something that has a much higher knowledge and understanding of musical composition than you could ever comprehend, because every little change and movement feels so right yet makes no logical sense to me at same time.

This isn't memorable music, this is brutal death metal for fans of 'Putrefaction in Progress'. There are no human feelings to relate to here either, so I guess you could compare it to Fleshgrind too. Oh yeah, and they decided to place the intro in the middle of the album and then end the album with a very well played acoustic guitar piece titled 'Severe Lacerations'. I don't understand 'Illuminations of Vile Engorgement' at all, but I do understand that I love it.

But then again, I guess it depends on how you define brutality. If brutality is ultrafast, heavy, guttural deathgrind, Enmity definitely nails it. This album is a fucking freak show, and it does come across as one 33-minute song of utter depravity.

I don't mind bands being brutal just for the sake of brutality, and these guys apparently claim to aim at out-brutalising everybody else. Fair enough. The question remains, do they succeed? Only partially. They're most certainly among the fastets, heaviest outfits out there, but . . .

The guitar work, once you're able to unearth it beneath the layers of mud that the production consists of, is mainly comprised of chugging riffs, a bit like Dying Fetus, but also a bit like (insert generic deathcore band name). I would have liked something slightly more intricate. I like simplicity in death metal (like Hateplow, Abscess, Bloodbath or Death Breath), but this is taking simplicity to extremes.

The drums are fast. End of story. Ridiculously fast. All the time. I like fast music as much as (or maybe more than) the next guy, and I laugh with glee every time I encounter something that is faster than anything. I enjoy listening to The Berzerker and Agoraphobic Nosebleed. But Enmity, while superbly fast, quite simply lack something, a certain quality that makes other bands more fascinating to listen to. I want to like this album more, but I can't. I want to say that it's the new definition of brutality, but it isn't.

In brutal death metal, a band like Brodequin manages to be more interesting, while maintaining a similar level of brutality. Other bands, such as Revenge, manage to sound muddy and extremely heavy and still seem even more extreme than Enmity. The first couple of Carcass albums are another example. Black Witchery another. Iperyt. The list goes on. And Watchmaker and The Axis of Perdition are probably the most extreme music I have ever had the honour og hearing. Both of these two bands are very well produced, very chaotic and very,
very evil.

To sum things up, this is not a bad effort, not at all. It just could have been much better without relinquishing any of the brutality that it strives so hard for.

Whatever you think the worst album is, if you have not chosen Enmity’s 2005 audio failure, then you are wrong. While Illuminations Of Vile Engorgment may not be the absolute worst, it is so horrifically awful that it deserves nothing more than a zero.

Okay, so I read the other reviews on the album…a couple of 0%’s and a 100%, with a 75 thrown in for good measure. I knew it was going to be fairly bad, but my own morbid curiosity got the better of me. It’s one of those situations where you think to yourself, “is it really that bad?”, and download it just to make sure. Well, I can honestly tell you, that it is really that bad. Everything about this album completely sucks to the point of rather listening to my oncoming tinnitus than what we have here.

The guitars have nothing. They’re heavy in the fact that they’re tuned low, but they have zero power, creativity or structure. Every riff is a sludgy concoction of random notes. And the breakdowns? All they do is chug, but there’s no excitement. Deathcore breakdowns have more worth than these ones because you can at least headbang like a scene kid to them…here, you can’t really do anything because they simply have nothing to offer. I can’t remember one riff from the album at all.

The drumming is terrible. I can tell the guy is talented, but that’s like me saying I can juggle spiked bowling pins on fire, but then demonstrating my talent by juggling one tennis ball. It’s not impressive, despite my knowledge of complex juggling. I have to say that he blasts way too much. Someone should probably take him aside and inform him that blasting for an entire album does not always equal brutality. Origin do it, but they do it well, and with guitar riffs to back it up. The snare sound is too loud, as well, so when the blasting starts up, the snare is the only thing you can focus on. The mixing, not to mention the sound of the snare itself, sucks.

The vocalist…well, let’s say he can’t juggle, and he lets the whole world know about it. And he lets us know all the time. There are barely any sections where he shuts the fuck up with his burping. Lyrics are absolutely useless. Honestly, there is no point, as you’ll never understand what is being said. A new vocalist is an absolute must.

The songwriting is non-existent. I feel like these songs were created in the space of 10 minutes. Why? Because every song sounds the fucking same. Now, that term can be thrown around a lot, but I really mean it…with the exception of “Intro” and “Severe Lacerations”, which are filler and outro tracks respectively, they all sound exactly alike. That is perhaps the worst aspect on this abomination: The fact that these two fuckheads could not write two different songs so the listener can get some variation. All these songs contain are “blast, blast, chug, chug, random sucky riff, blast, blast.” I can’t get over how monotonous everything is. Even down to the fucking tempo of each song…it doesn’t change! They stuck to one tempo, possibly the fastest the drummer could go without making a mistake, and planted themselves there. It’s all too repetitive for me, and even for those who like this sort of thing.

This is the end of the Universe, folks, where originality, songwriting, distinction between songs, and atmosphere in death metal music go to die horribly. I like a bit of brutal death, but this is the worst band I’ve ever heard in this genre. Nobody needs to hear this, unless you’re a masochist, or you can actually juggle bowling pins and would like to prove me wrong. I hate this fucking band so much.

Something funny happens about this band: some people think it's the maximum brutality and other think it'sa brutal nonsense. Enmity are an American brutal death duo with the apparent intention of pushing extreme music beyond no one else. And in some way, they got it. But at the price of being a bit boring by the third track.

I'd say the main weak point is the drummer, he abuses too much of the same blast beat all the time. There are no fills. Very rarely he changes to a double bass rhythm with some snare, and in ONE moment he uses the cymbals… I think. Guitar is tuned to G, more or less, but mysteriously the palm-mutings sound quite weak, with no bass. The fast parts are barely distinguishable, they sound more or less like scratching some wires with a sponge. Bass guitar, assuming it's recorded, throws in some frequencies only audible by elephants. Vocals are maybe the best side of the album: the singer has swallowed the mike along with a bottle of bleach and punches himself in the stomach until getting a wet and hot gurgle. All in all, they have achieved a quite characteristic sound, which does not lack merit in extreme metal.

All the songs sound quite the same, exception made on an ambient "intro" at the 5th position, which breaks the alphabetic order of the tracks a bit… that's right, the songs are almost in alphabetic order, I think it's worth to list them:
1.Bloated Slabs
2.Charred, Mutilated, Dislimbed
3.Disembowel the Meek
4.Facial Carvings
5.Intro
6.HackSaw Spinal Butchery
7.Illuminations of Vile Engorgement
8.Rotted Divinity
9.Surgical Reanimation
10.Skinned Alive
11.Severe Lacerations
Coincidence? Neglect? Heavy joke? Well, even if they were in different order, I don't think the final result would vary too much, every track sounds pretty much the same, except that mysterious intro in the middle of the album and the last track, which is a classic guitar piece.

All this written, a very low rating should be expected, shouldn't it? Well, the truth is that Enmity achieve their objective quite nicely. The record is fucking brutal. And if you are searching for that, you've got it.


(Originally written for and published on www.pitchline-zine.com)

Brutal: adjective - like an animal, relating to or typical of beasts or lower animals.

I don’t see how this word has come to have the widespread use, and positive connotation it does. Besides that, this game of trying to be “teh most Br00tal” is old. Kreator ended that game in 1986 with the song Pleasure to Kill. I still have yet to hear any of these retarded bands make a song more intensely “brutal” than that. Trying to go lower and lower with the vocals doesn’t make it more heavy or evil, it just makes you sound like a dumbass. Furthermore, every time a band comes along claiming to be the most brutal, it just means they have a new shitty way to do some kind of idiotic vocals; the riffs, guitar playing, structure, themes, tones, none of that is ever any different.

Anyway, about the music.

When I first heard this album, I seriously just laughed.

The guitar is flat and nearly impossible to make out in the music. Discerning between notes is a real feat, and the only real change in the static is the exact same rhythm used on every track. The drums remain at a constant blast that is, quite literally, the exact same speed in every song, and literally is almost the only beat used through the entire length of the album. With no fills, stops or variation of any sort. No joke.

The vocals are continual Jabba the Hut gurgles, that again, almost never cease. It seriously sounds like a 3 second sound bit looped endlessly, of some giant monster you’d see on some sci-fi movie. Now that’s what I call brutal!

... or fucking retarded. Whichever you prefer.

There is only two things that break from the non-stop stick-your-dick-in-a-blender stupidity of the rest of the album. The “intro” which falls on the fifth track, again showing the brilliance of the minds behind this work. It consists of some random, echoe-laden noises. And the last track, which consists of very broken, incoherent “classical” guitar playing. Obviously they’re going for a flamenco or classical sound with the finger picking and subtle phrasing , but you can hear his hands move across wound strings. Which shows that he is not playing a classical or Spanish guitar with nylon strings, but playing one of those $75 acoustic guitars from Wal-Mart. At least, I think that’s a safe bet.

Like I said, this whole idea of trying to continually be more extreme or "br00tal" is old, and I think this album clearly marked the end of it, and should show to everyone that it's time to give it a fucking rest.

I have to admit, the horrible things that were said about this album were exactly what led me to get ahold of it. It’s just one of those things where you say “Man, I gotta hear that.” And lo, it was just as stupid and shitty as they said. So if you’re like me, get it if you really need a laugh, and remember kids, if you want to be brutal - just start picking the lice out of your friends’ hair.


(Originally written for www.MetalCrypt.com)

The full length of Enmity. By this point they have shed every last speck of humanity they have ever had. The band at this point is above all comprehension, and listening to this entire album will make your ears bleed and your mind recoil with pain. The music is inimitable, irreproducible, and absolutely sick. Nothing more can be said, this music is not for people. Cannot be linked to any other bands, and the only reason we still call this death metal is because of the somewhat gory and misanthropic themes implicit in it. The music is not anything you have ever heard. It is as if there were no separate instruments, but instead you are the aural witness to the twisting and writhing of a giant snake like entity as it spews forth obscure lyrical fragments that sound like they have been half digested. There are no hooks, although this one brake down is repeated in different songs for what purpose, we can only guess.
When confronted with such obvious greatness many people look away with repulsion and envy. You cannot conceive, even begin to conceive of this music. All I can say is that they have made a musical genre all for themselves, and the lack of like minded individuals makes sure this will be a one band art form. True unique brutal music.
This review of mine has been rejected more than once because it does not give you an idea of what the music sounds like. I am sorry but I do not think I can get any closer. Having absolutely no rival and no equal, and having no other bands to link it too, I am in quiet a pickle. They do not sound like other bands. The vocals are guttural, but I could not name a single band where I have heard these kinds of gutturals, I am not even sure if they are distorted, but they seem to be ‘clean’. The music is like a mix between Wormed and blasting bands like Carnal or Pyaemia, but only in respect to non-stop blasting, and Wormed for the weirdness. But this does not sound like anything else. Crunchy but kinda soft guitars with not too much distortion, unbelievable kind of high end gutturals, no discernable bass, and blast beats that fluctuate to sound like a single monstrous entity. High lights to me are ‘Facial Carvings’, ‘Bloated Slabs’ and ‘Hacksaw Spinal Butchery’, and of course the instrumental classic guitar shred fest ‘Severe Lacerations’. That last piece is the sickest thing to be done to a classical guitar, not so much of the technique end of things, but because he slaps and uses the guitar as a percussion instrument at one point, and at one point busts out a melody that could have sat well with the boys from At The Gates, even. Nothing compares.

People, I give you, Enmity, the heaviest band ever. Not suprisingly, I also give you, Enmity, the worst band ever. That;s right. The worst band ever. Not even Anal Cunt's 5 thousand something song EP is this hard to listen to. You know something's gone horribly wrong when a serious studio (taken, a piss-poor studio) release is more annoying and terrible than a garage recorded 7" made by a band who wanted merely to annoy you.

I bought this a while ago from the CD place on ebay, not really knowing what it was, but intrigued by the comparisons to Brodequin and Pustulated. If you're not 'in the know', Brodequin and Pustulated are ultra brutal death/grind acts with burping gurgly vocals, simple yet catchy riffs, and insanely fast drummers. Although I usually hate brutal death metal, these two bands are pretty decent, talented songwriters and are actually fun to listen to.
So how does Enmity compare? Well, it's much more brutal than the aforementioned bands, and um... y'know, that's it.

This is fucking horrible. HORRIBLE. Enmity have managed to push the boundaries, alright, but they went straight out of music and into pure shit. Every song on this waste of plastic is impossible to differentiate from the next, possibly due to the terrible, terrible production, and more likely, the complete lack of skill or talent. Guitars are impossibly downtuned and resemble the sound of chewing really crunchy cereal. I'm serious, go get a bowl of fresh frosted flakes, cram a huge handful into your mouth and chew slowly. You hear the loud 'crnch mnch' noise? That's exactly what the guitars sound like. Even Mortician isn't this terrible when it comes to writing riffs, and you don't know how hard it is for me to say that.

If there is a bass guitar here, it's either in the form of white noise, or it's mimicing the guitar. Either way, it adds nothing to the music but adds mud to the already muddy production. Next we have what appears to be the drum line(s). When I say drum line(s), I use the term very loosely, as there is no visible difference between one and the next. Every song starts out 'brutally' with just pure lackluster blasting, maybe slows down once or twice for the 'totally heavy breakdown', and the blasts away again. I also use the term blasting very lightly as well, as this guy can barely play, let alone do it impressively fast. The 'breakdowns' are not done is stereotypical NYDM style, but merely go very...very...slow and boringly. Unfortunately, the 'breakdowns' are the only semi-coherent part about the whole album. The rest of this shit stack is impossible to sit through due to the mindless blast beats and incredibly annoying vocals that NEVER let up.

The vocals are just an endless stream of anomalic pig-squeal gurgles. When I say endless, I mean, there is no breaks in between. Ever. There are no vocal lines or any effort put in whatsoever. Not only that, but it sounds like he just wasn't brutal enough to make real gurgles so he borrowed a pitchshifter, growled his grocery list into it once, then put it on constant repeat. He just keeps on squealing til I killed my family from the pent up rage of spending four dollars on this.

Go ahead if you must, and download a track or two. Heck, buy the whole album! If this review isn't enough to convince you, there is something terribly wrong. I've never heard anything this terrible before, and probably will never hear anything worse, and I'm not some metal n00b, either. I can't even say that my views are opinions on this. This is fact. Enmity has managed to create the heaviest album ever, but at the cost of ANY coherence, musical talent, and structure. You should only buy this if you want a conversation piece, and nothing more.