Album of the Week: Enemy of the Sun

In an effort to write more about music, and more in general, I'm going to start writing about particular album every week(ish). It was fun for a while with the random 10, but it isn't easy to write about a random song. Sometimes, I learn a lot but, mostly, it's too much damn work. Instead, I'm going to stop leaving it up to the fates and write on some of my favorite albums, or just whatever the hell I want to when I write the thing. First up was on my ten favorite rock album list from a while back (one year ago yesterday, as it goes), from my favorite metal band and the best rock show I've ever seen, Neurosis' Enemy of the Sun.

Though they would go way farther with their ideas, Enemy of the Sun is the encapsulation of what Neurosis was and what they would become. After their debut, a very standard-issue West Coast punk album called Pain of Mind, they veered closer to metal until their third album (second in 1992) and first for Alternative Tentacles (though that label reissued the first two and made money off them until Neurosis started their own), Souls at Zero. With it, the band threw all the punk aesthetic out the window for slowed down, long-form metal. Not only was their change in sound like I've never heard elsewhere, I'd never really heard a band sound like that before. A year later, they would expand the sound into what became a mind-blowing experience for me.

Enemy of the Sun opens the way its predecessor does: with a vocal sample. Instead of the confusion at the beginning of the former, however, this sets a very particular mood. "Are you lost?" "Yes" and, with that, the drum and bass kick in a slow, natural rhythm while the questioner goes on about the amazing brevity of life. Steve Von Till's vocals come in slowly while the sample fades out, but the lyrics aren't the typical gloom and doom from much of the metal world. Make no mistake, the words are violent and are belted out in screams, but it is the kind of violence that displays the Earth's power over humanity and how easily we are snuffed by the elements. Fire and water are all over the place, but so is the necessity of the harvest and the ever-repeating ritual of life. There is an empowerment and a spirituality in the lyrics that trumps the darkness.

The words aside, these same ideas make the music even better, which is more important to me in almost any realm. The album is a pure wall of sound, heavy as hell, and oppressive as anything I've ever heard. Through this, unlike most bands that came before them, the music lives and breathes. The rhythms change organically as they move through the waves of guitar and the vocals, one singer in frustrated screams and the other in beastial growls, move in line with the changes in the music. To compound it, their extensive use of traditional acoustic instruments, repeated samples and field recordings that, when added into the huge, sludgy, Sabbath-style riffs, add a dimension to the music that I'd never heard in metal before. Beyond the traditional two guitar, bass, and drums setup, of which they make a tight hardcore band, the addition of strings, bagpipes and didgeridoo at various times give the songs a fully orchestrated feel. The samples add contextual weight that obscure lyrics that are difficult to understand never can. The third track, called "Burning Flesh in Year of Pig," is a recording of a report on the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk during the Vietnam War that is accented by noisy tape loops and isn't pretty. Behind everything, in all the silences and through all the noise, is a constant stream of ambient sounds that is trance-inducing. This culminates into the final song, "Cleanse," a thirty minute epic of primal drums, vocals and noise that has many times driven me to a near hypnotic state, never having realized that eighteen minutes have passed it flows together so naturally.

None of this is done as gimmickry, however. While the eight songs average over nine minutes a piece, none of that excessive amount of time is used for noodling. There are no discernible guitar solos anywhere on the album and, while Neurosis is by far not free from pretension, the time is used to build and release tension, not to impress listeners with their prowess. Enemy of the Sun, and Neurosis in general, is a case where the sum is greater than its parts. The album has a feeling of wholeness, like it emerged naturally from the Earth. While this may all sound like some kind of hippie-metal, let me assure you that the album rocks your ass off, even if it takes a little time to get there.

Enemy of the Sun was a revelation for me. With its roots squarely in metal, it found common ground with folk, electronic, and classical to make something really unique. Over the years, they've expanded their sound, taking it farther away from metal and more toward the folk and ambient sides and into strange new places. At this point, I think that their later albums Times of Grace and Through Silver in Blood are far better albums, but Enemy of the Sun will always have the top place in my heart for how wide it opened my eyes to the possibilities of metal.