Album Review : Melechesh – Enki
Melechesh is a Band I love so I am doing this review. They were my introduction into middle eastern music influenced extreme metal. Or Oriental Metal as it’s called. The sound at first for them was hard to get into, lots of odd drum beats and really weird sounding melodies. But Eventually I started to like it. It took around 7 months to get into them and when I did I realized just how good they became.
Melechesh was actually introduced to me at some record store in 1998. Someone had Djinn playing then. At first I hated it. I hadn’t gotten into extreme metal yet. It took me a while to get into it, even when I tried out Death for the first time. The vocals turned me off and the drum beats didn’t sound right.
I heard them on an internet radio station later on and they sounded good but weird sounding. I eventually bought a few of their albums around my birthday in 2017 and then something happened. I couldn’t stop listening to them. I played their music so much that I had 700 plays on last.fm in 6 months! This cd I am reviewing today, was the first cd I got by them.
Enki starts out with a song called Temper Tempest Enlil Enraged. This song is fucking heavy at the beginning as blast beasts and oriental melodies blast through. Then it gets a little bit softer, and then a massively heavy thrash riff just rips through and sick sounding black metal vo.cals come in. It’s a heavy intro.
The Next song is much more black metal than the first and has some interesting drumming. The One After it , Lost tribes, has Max Cavalera from Sepultura doing vocals. It is a good song, but it actually was one of the hardest ones for me to get into, mainly because it’s riffs were very hard to digest. I Still Like it, bitt it’s not their best song.
The one after it, Multiple truths, is fantastic though. It has one of the catchiest melodies they’ve ever written to start up the song. Then The Drumming Kicks in. It’s pretty good for the melechesh song it is and is probably my favorite song on the cd.
The Title Track Enki, is excellent too, being very long and epic. The Singer of Rotting Christ is one this one. It’s a pretty epic song with a lot of oriental instrumentation and drumming. It lasts a long time and has some really cool proggy styled stuff half way through.
The Next song just Rips! Metatron and Man is fucking heavy and at one point it gave me a real bonafide earache. I guess I blsst Sumerian Blackened Thrash Metal too loudly. Don’t worry It was on headphones, the neighbors didn’t complain about my devil music habits. The song however is thrashy as fuck. It has a great riff near the beginning which is brutal. The whole song is really well written too, and at the end you get this almost vintage melechesh sound as the whole song starts to shift toward oriental metal and a middle eastern drum beat kicks in and the melodies sound more arabian then.
The Next song is a cool song but is not all that great overall. A little boring sounding, probably my least favorite song on the cd. Then you get the instrumental. It’s long, and very intricate. I have no clue what kind of middle eastern music it is but it’s amazing.
Next up is the final epic track “The Outsiders”, which sounds really atypical for a melechesh song. I don’t know what kind of music it’s inspired by but it can’t be typical middle eastern stuff. It sounds kind of bizarre, but cool in a way too. Long and epic, this song also has some cool prog elements in it. At one point a blastbeats rips through. Before it you get this proggy drum beat that sounds like Melechesh were trying out a new style. It’s neat, proggy oriental metal? I guess that exists. Need to hear more of it.
Overall this cd was amazing. Only 1 subpar song, the rest were great or good, and it shows you that this band is NOT slowing down, they’re still good, even in 2015! I can’t wait for they’re new one, I bet that will be even better. They have gone through some lineup changes, where moloch, their lead guitarist has left. Now they have some new musicians in, and I hope that change pays off. We will see. Overall, Kickass CD! 9/10
