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Breaking Legs and Drowning with Enojado

Posted in Reviews on June 23rd, 2009 by JJ Koczan

Nice digipak.Opening track “Stop” on? Enojado‘s debut full-length Till the Distance is Complete (The Black Desert Inn) doesn’t really give much of an idea of what the Deutsche metallers are setting out to do with the record. The first three minutes of the five-minute track are near n?-metal before a really sludgy part gives way to more chugging. Fortunately, although they approach Disturbed-style thickheadedness on “Stolen Charger,” most of the songwriting draws influence directly from Entombed. The title cut, which follows “Stop” not a moment too soon, is the real mission statement. Guitarist and singer Stephan Kieserling is a one-man combination of L.G. Petrov and Alex Hellid, adjoining his (mostly) rough vocals with a six string tone straight out of Sunlight Studios and taken further in the stoner/doom direction than the seminal Swedes ever dared to tread.

I think this is actually an alternate cover, but with some fancy Gimp work, the title of the record is gone! Take that, artistic intent!“Mammoth City” is set on a killer Kyuss riff as Kieserling and second guitarist Stephan Merkle fuzz out before the mammothness for which the city is named shows up in the form of Martin Merkle‘s rumbling bass. For his cleaner vocals, which come up more later in the record, Kieserling combines the approaches of Pepper Keenan circa Wiseblood and James Hetfield when he had the mullet. There’s bite and darkness to the material, but as the principal songwriter Kieserling proves somewhat uneven. By the time “Underdog Blood Exposure” — track four and possibly the heaviest of all 10 — came around, I found myself wondering when or if the band was going to make the Cephalic Carnage left turn into ultra-doom that I’d been hoping and the guitar tone had been begging for. They never did.

Interestingly, they hit the stoner/doom fork in the road and pointed Till the Distance is Complete squarely toward the former, hitting the aforementioned “Stolen Charger” bump before going ?ber-Uprising on “Broken Legs,” asking the deep question in the titular line, “Have you ever tried to run with broken legs?” Awesome. I’m not about to hold the blatant Entombed influence against them. I’ve said it before: the world needs more “Seeing Red.”

The real kicker is the soft, (gasp!) sweet guitar opening of album highlight “Still Drowning.” It seems to come out of nowhere, yet there were somehow just enough stonerisms preceding it to make it fit perfectly. If anything on the record offsets the dips of “Stop” and “Stolen Charger,” “Still Drowning” is it.

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