Album Review: Sölicitör - Enemy In Mirrors
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
I’ve been absurdly stressed out lately. Increasingly my head feels like it’s being pushed through a keyhole, this sense of bands tightening, tightening, tightening around my temples crushing my skull in on itself. My eyes feel sore; each thought less the spritely zip of an electronic pulse fizzing through pliable neurons so much as a weary trudge from A to B, grinding and misfiring with the primitive, slovenly drag of a dial-up modem. I’ve not much in me for the intellectual pursuits; I try to read and the words dart away over the page like ink-black fish shoals, the page turns and I find that nothing of the last 10 minutes has sank any deeper than dust on glass. It’s an affliction with which I’m familiar. Yet hope is not lost, and while alternative solutions to the malady may well exist, the one to which I turn for a sore head is, perhaps, a touch counterintuitive.
You must bang the shit out of it.
Today’s remedy: Speed, thrash, trad, and even a smoky seasoning of black metal in a bestial concoction as much homage to venerated hallmarks of the genre as it is a fresh-faced broadside of contemporary exuberance. It’s melodic and tuneful, but never more than a minute away from thrashing your jaw into splinters. Distortion is scratchy and sharp, a nesting doll of glass fragments, giving it this distinctly retro feel of an early thrash demo, but when the band says fuck the slow shit and slams a pair of triple espressos through it’s eye sockets as on “Fallen Angel” then I defy you to claim it lacks for punch. “Iron Wolves of War” is the splendid offspring of early Metallica and black metal that I didn’t know I was in such dire need of on the drizzly Wednesday it decided to blow up my headphones on, whereas “The Devil’s Hand (Part 2)” forms a Clandestine séance to channel the infinite genius of Painkiller, reminding us all why that album is such an essential cornerstone of all metal; the way the intro riff slips right back in at the closing moments of the track, velvet-smooth, is done with such preturnatural slickness that it pins the song to your hippocampus like a formative trauma.
There’s a joy to it, I think. As though there is literally nothing the band would rather be doing than playing metal; it’s especially noticeable in the shlocky melodrama of arterial spurt tracks like “Crimson Battle Beast”, that fires out the gate like it thinks crystal meth is a food group. It’s common to ascribe a “soul” to things, some ethereal quality imbued that marks it as alive and possessed of a personality all it’s own. It’s an esoteric thing for sure, but whatever it is, Enemy in Mirrors is positively swollen with it. It erupts in fountains from it’s every chorus, it’s every harmony, it’s every instantly invigorating killing spree of blastbeats. It’s in the throat of Amy Lee Carson, Lungs like barrels of nails, booming forth this fulminant bark at once bluesy and ballsy. It’s in the demented shredding licks that launch along the fretboard like rail gun fire. The whole thing is steeped, marinated, infused with a surpassing love for metal that takes already great songs and applies that final gloss of power and steel that takes the tracks from ones that I enjoy to ones that I believe in.
Faults are relatively few in number; the intro is inoffensive but inessential, and while no tracks are weak there are obvious highlights in the album that steal the shine a bit from some other songs, even if each one is strong in isolation. But at the end of the day, There’s a timeless quality to music that flies out the speakers like a raptor 4 cans deep of monster energy, and if you let this particular bundle of tooth-n-claw heavy metal thunder into your heart, I’ve a feeling it’ll stay there.
