Review: Enopolis – ISIHASTIKA

Style: “symphotechprogbrutal death metal”, time-wasting cacophony (Mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: N/A
Review by: Christopher
Country: US-HA
Release date: 13 June, 2023

Here at The Progressive Subway, we endeavour to bring you objective reviews of legitimate music that, to a greater or lesser degree, is worthy of your time. We don’t dole out terrible scores profligately because what would be the point? We’re all here to enjoy music, not to endure it. And yet, on our researches, we sometimes dredge up some truly awful bands. Every once in a while it can prove useful to submit ourselves to such sonic gruel in order to more fully appreciate the good stuff; that, and I owed Zach and Andy for giving them bands to review that they loathed (Simulacra and Max Enix, respectively). 

Hence, Enopolis, a “band” from Hawaii, who make “music”. As you’ll have seen above, they claim to make “symphotechprogbrutal death metal” which seems a convenient shorthand for admitting that this music simply can’t have been made in good faith. In practice, Enopolis borrow from plenty of genres (doom, thrash and black metal, mostly, which are notably absent from the band’s self-descriptive portmanteau) without really being definable as one—not because they transcend genre so much as they fail to meet the minimum requirements to be defined as ‘music.’ 

Every musical element is simple—there’s nothing here any musician with a year on their chosen instrument couldn’t master—but brought together in such a consciously cacophonous manner as to pretend to complexity. I’m fairly sure it’s all in 4/4 but there may be other time signatures in play here, though I’d be willing to bet they’re accidental; the band barely keep time—the riff that plays throughout “ASUMPTION” (sic) seems to change tempo after every iteration. And for anyone wondering if the production is going to be good: it isn’t. ISIHASTIKA is brickwalled to hell, everything’s loud and flat, so the terrible music can sound its absolute worst. 

At times, there’s something moderately interesting buried in the mix—for example, the lead guitar part that starts around 4:30 into “METOHION” or some of the riffs early in “AVIATYTZAR” (to its credit, this is the only track that is vaguely credible as a song)—that makes you briefly contemplate the idea that these guys might have some discernible talent. And I suppose if you actively try to make eighty-six minutes of unlistenable dreck, at some point you might stumble upon the concept of melody by accident. The back half of the twenty-minute-long track “AGAINST EVIL” is just one endless, lumbering sub-doom riff that manages to change occasionally while also functionally doing nothing to stave off boredom. In isolation, thirty seconds of these ersatz riffs can sound passable, but stitched together into the Frankensteinian abomination that is ISIHASTIKA, any potential merit is wholly negated. 

I commend the drummer for being able to hit his drums fast and slow. Mostly he just bashes the snare like a haywire android, but he also does something approximating blast beats. The tempo barely varies and he just bashes away, occasionally throwing in a roll across the toms, as though his own monotonous rhythms sent him to sleep and he listed sideways whilst his flailing arms continued to keep time (I use the term ‘keep time’ loosely). His overall contribution to this execrable nonsense is as pointless as that of his companions (I actually suspect this is a one-man band, but we’ll treat each instrument as a different “person”).

Enopolis’ musical abilities are clearly questionable but they have the requisite talent (if I can use such a word) to write what can be legally termed “riffs”. If they tried to make a hard rock album it wouldn’t be good, but it wouldn’t be as radically terrible as this irredeemable effluent. And I haven’t even got to the “vocals”. To their credit, they do contribute the one good moment on the album: an utterly insane clean scream on “ARACHNORAZIEL” that’s essentially the musical equivalent of an entertainingly thunderous fart cutting through a dull eulogy for a loathed, pederast uncle. However, for the other 85 minutes and 50 seconds, they sound somewhere between the worst blackgaze screams you can imagine and grindcore gurgling, with occasional incoherent shouting. Most of the time, the vocals are so buried and compressed that the end result sounds like what I imagine the “ominous whooshing” from the Twin Peaks: The Return audio-descriptive subtitles sounds like. 

You may be thinking that Enopolis sounds like it’ll be so-bad-it’s-good like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room or Morrissey’s abysmal novel List of the Lost, but I can assure you it isn’t. ISIHASTIKA is a journey into the dark heart of tedium, and there is absolutely nothing to be gained from listening to it. It is utterly without merit and may even be a violation of the US constitution under the eighth amendment, but its complete failure to achieve anything remotely near to musicality is at least an instructive case study in how not to write music. Enopolis’ incompetence is multifarious and yet it can be succinctly summarised as a near-inability to play their instruments, and a total lack of understanding of the basics of composition. I will never get these eighty-six minutes back and I will be taking legal action against Andy for making me review this. Now let’s never speak of it again. 

Recommended tracks: none of them
You may also like: absolutely anything else, or if you want to read more from our writers at their most enraged: Simulacra, Max Enix, The Dark Atom
Final verdict: 1/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube

Label: Independent

Enopolis is:
(no information available)