Because you and I both know this thing has a good chance of shooting straight the hell off the rails, I’ll frontload the critical bit: Enki is Melechesh‘s most self-assured and accomplished album to date, and nearly every inch of it teems with the hair-raising electricity that probably got most of us into this game to begin with.
With that out of the way, I’ve got a question for you: Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight? Have you howled your burning freedom loud enough to split the sky? Have you tasted the blood-red marrow of creation? Do you remember the first time heavy metal sank its teeth in you? The feeling that you had tapped into something bigger than yourself and bigger than the musicians who had channeled it? Bigger than Jesus, heavier than God, and brighter than a thousand suns?
I can’t guarantee Enki will bring you back to that place, but by hell and damnation, it does for me.
Enki sounds like all the best aspects of Absu colliding with the burnished thrash mastery of Megadeth‘s Rust in Peace. As such, Melechesh’s sound is hardly without precedent, but these songs are so smart, and animated with such fire, that the cumulative effect is breathtaking. “Lost Tribes” most clearly invokes the spirit of Megadeth with its effortlessly confident intro that speaks in the same voice as “Five Magics.” And although Melechesh’s most natural tools are thrash and black metal, Enki also roils with a similar – if more extreme – energy as Sepultura’s Chaos A.D. (This is helped, certainly, by Max Cavalera’s guest spot on “Lost Tribes,” but the feeling pervades the album as a whole.)
Eminently more important than who or what exactly the album sounds like is what exactly the album sounds like it is trying to do, and from the very outset it is clear that Enki wants to gather all the nations and deliver unto them the rock. No matter the differences in mood, method, or motivation, Melechesh now clearly ranks with Behemoth, Watain, and Satyricon in that Enki is extreme metal on an arena scale: this is music to move bodies. “The Pendulum Speaks” is one of the wildest successes on display, shoehorning the viper’s snarl of black metal into a muscular thrash framework, and all of it flush with that unmistakable two-step rhythm. (On that: the particular rhythm I mean will be seared in your muscle memory, but to be technical it’s a dotted quarter note and eighth note followed by two staccato quarter notes. If you’d like something snappier, though, I’ve been mentally referring to it as the “Arabian d-beat.”)
Enki is packed with jam after jam after righteous motherfucking jam; some songs go for a feral lunge (“Metatron and Man”) and others for a slow-burn groove (“Multiple Truths”), but Melechesh manages to pack equivalent power and intensity no matter the mode or tempo. Each song bears the trace of careful revision and tight editing, but the stitches are smoothed-over so that every whip-taut turn and effusion of joyful vitriol seems both natural and inevitable. The only real gripe about Enki is that its instrumental interlude saps the album’s momentum. It’s generally a fine piece of folk/ambient using indigenous instrumentation – quite like Karl Sanders’s solo albums – but a smarter move would have been to cut it from eight minutes down to three or four, and to move it a few tracks sooner in the order, instead of second from the end.
Where Melechesh really elevates this album from great to truly special is in a pair of psychedelic desert-jam blowouts. The mid-album gem “Enki-Divine Nature Awoken” takes some time setting its mood (including the unmistakable guest vocals of Sakis from Rotting Christ), but when it settles in to its irresistible, dust-whipping groove, it locks the listener into a trance where all that matters is the rhythm and the magic it imparts. However, it’s on album closer “The Outsiders” that Melechesh truly marshals all of its strengths into a stunning bit of alchemy. The band settles into to a nearly twelve-minute stretch of locked-in, sinewy groove, equal parts regal and sinister. The entire piece functions almost as modal jazz, with long stretches tied to a single anchor note. The guitars lash and sway further and further away from the root, only to be whipped back and swallowed by the irrefutable logic of its gravity. As the album’s longest song by half, “The Outsiders” finds Melechesh riding a devilish dare: Can you marry hypnotic jams and shredding? This is the sound of a tremendously accomplished heavy metal band digging their way into the same ecstatic trance that you might find in Indian sitar music or West African guitar music.
Enki is both sprint and marathon, explosion and smolder, one-night stand and years’-long romance. It is a nearly flawless display of heavy metal’s timeless appeal, but even more importantly, it is simply one hell of a lot of fun. Let’s kick the shit out of winter, throw open the windows, and let in life.
