ENABLER — La Fin Absolue du Monde (review)

ENABLER — La Fin Absolue du Monde album cover

Album · 2014 · Hardcore Punk

4/5 · 2014-07-25
Time Signature

New life...

Genre: hardcore / crossover

La Fin Absolue Du Monde is the second full-length effort by the Milwaukee-based hardcore trio Enabler. Inspired by John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, the album treats the listener to a gritty production an onslaught of aggressive and compellingly simple hardcore tunes. Musically, the album spans most of the contemporary hardcore genre, but does seem to steer clear of the clichés of modern metalcore. The tracks on the album seem to roughly fall under to stylistic categories: hardcore punk and crossover thrash (at the end of the day, this categorization is, of course, to a large extent an artificial one, but, please play along).

Thus, the opening track 'Close My Eyes' is an upbeat hardcore track with references to d-beat punk and an energetic hard rock feel to it Similarly, 'I Got a bad feeling about this' and 'Prey' explore the more crusty vistas of the hardcore genre. Another hardcore-oriented track is 'Rain Darkness' , which takes a more melodic turn, though, while 'The Exiles' fuses grooves with elements from noisecore. The closing track 'Consequence' starts out fiercely aggressive, but morphs into a heavy crunchy midtempo breakdown.

Moving on to the crossover category, 'New Life' combines noise-inspored hardcore with crossover thrash and revolves around a couple of simple, but fierce thrashy riffs. Continuing further down the thrash metal avenue, 'Neglect' is an uptempo affair which even appears to take cues from melodic death metal, and features a crushing breakdown akin to those delivered by Agnostic Front on Warriors. 'Information Overload' is a barrage of crossover thrash of a more brutal kind, featuring some neat stereo effects and teaching the metalcore kids how to do proper breakowns. 'Balance of Terror' is a strangely melodic crossover tune which builds on a chucking guitar riff, while 'World Sterilization' and the stomping 'Sickened by the Wake' remind me slightly of Prong – the latter in particular makes me think of Prong's 'Snap Your Fingers, Snap your Neck' or Cianide's 'Curse of the Dead' (without being a rip-off of either song).

While all tracks on the album are very good and should appeal to both fans of metal and hardcore (and their respective post variants), there are two tracks that are outstandingly brilliant. Firstly, 'Felony' is a melodic affair, in which melody and aggression are nicely balanced, and which is characterized by a sense of gritty grandeur throughout. 'Linear Existence' departs from the otherwise simplistic style of most of the songs on the album (although there are bursts of technicality every now and then throughout the album), and takes somewhat progressive path, combining d-beat and thrash metal with bewildering time signatures and grooves.

The production is, as mentioned, gritty and crunchy and suits the aggressive compositions extremely well, and, musically, La Fin Absolue Du Monde is an astounding artistic success.

(review originally posted at seaoftranquility.org)