Enslaved = Hipster Emo + Cock Rock - "E" Review (0%)

Whenever you wander among the teenage social wastelands of the earth, you will encounter many risible characters deserving of the utmost mockery and each one will have his own catchphrase or mantra explaining why he knows something when he does not.

One example is "I like a little bit of everything" for those who pick music based on it having a great deal of surface level variety - i.e. different vocals, different rhythms, different moods... same old boring shit below the surface.

They are very concerned that their music might be too similar if it were consistent, so like good hipsters they like quirk and superficial variety. It's the same mentality that makes them order variety plates in restaurants, they don't know what they want, because they don't know what they like, mainly because they have no idea who they are and need to define themselves via their void in definition, mirroring their void in self-worth.

Enslaved is a band for that segment of the world. It is putatively some form of black metal, but compositionally is glorified cock rock with additions of all sorts of odd sounds and different riff types. Then if you missed the memo, they're going to screech at you full volume so you know "This Is Extreme Music Yo!" and have cheesy dramatic song structure changes to emphasize that "Something Is Happening", when in fact nothing is.

As each song ends, you'll note that it came back to the exact same place where it started. Not a restatement of theme in a new context, as in narrative death metal music, but literally, the same stuff as the intro after a distracting middle full of keyboard French horns and harpsichords.

Enslaved's music is like window shopping: see the world through a glass without having to adapt to it at all.

And correspondingly, it's both hollow and annoying.

Enslaved = Hipster Emo + Cock Rock

This is a nice little emo album, but as this isn't a punk site - although I personally like some hardcore punk, which is a different genre from generic radio "punk rock" aka this - there's no interest or point in me review this any further.

It's time to drop labels like shoegaze and blackdrift and call this what it is, which is late-1980s and early-1990s style emo rock. The same dissonant chord progressions to emphasis "depression", rhythms, vocal inflections, atmospheres, even song topics and naming conventions persist, with nothing new added.

There's a little aesthetic tweaking here, but not nearly enough to conceal the music's true nature: as far removed from Burzum, Darkthrone and Phantom as it is from masculinity.

There is zero metal, and zero black metal, in this release.

Other than that, it's OK, I guess, but all these bands sound the same. What, how can you say that, that's intolerant! Yes, but given how little musical variation is to be found between the "different" songs of the same band, it would be even harder to conceal the absolute similarity between the music of bands that share this genre (emo).

That's why emo and rock are so popular with record labels and unemployed musicians alike. If you master a few techniques, it's really easy to do and you'll sound just like your heroes in no time. That is, before you get a job working at McDonald's, take out the piercings and try to hide the tattoos to get on with your self-pitying prole-drone life as a new below average citizen of the modern state.

E score: 0/100.

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