Review Summary: Sometimes to appreciate the truly good, one has to look to the truly bad to compare it to. This epitomizes the latter.
Emmure are amazing in their own little way. Somehow the band have thrived off of being mediocre to awful their whole career and still they haven't made any significant changes to their (REALLY BASIC) musical formula. Revolving around the stereotypes of the deathcore genre, only with additional contrived electronic elements thrown in for good measure, Eternal Enemies is exactly what you'd expect from an Emmure release, and as a result is best left to fester, probably in a landfill heap somewhere.
As always, the most notable area of the music is the vocal delivery of Frankie Palmeri. His fairly average deathcore style of vocals facilitate the spewing of the band's awful lyrics; nothing here really lives up to the astonishingly amazing "Diagonal ass niggah" outside of
Free Publicity, but there's no change regarding the usual glut of random swearing that always seems to lack any impact. Forming the backdrop for this are the usual chugging, bottom string riffs and breakdowns from the guitars and bass, which are admittedly better here than on some of the band's prior releases;
A Gift, A Curse opens with a fairly decent riff with some actual harmony, albeit only to wall it off with, yup, a pointless breakdown, whilst its chorus and some of its breaks offer some riffing variety besides the usual. Otherwise there aren't too many surprises here, and whilst the drum performances are competent and reasonably effective in their delivery, there's really nothing offered here to sustain any interest beyond the sheer hilarity of some of the lyrics and vocal lines.
Emmure's consistent issue with repetitiveness is no less prominent on this release than prior. Whilst some tracks like the aforementioned
A Gift, A Curse and
Grave Markings provide moments of distinction between the usual monotonous breakdowns present in all of the songs, everything blends into a singular mass of the bottom string of the guitars. The occasional industrial elements that seep into tracks like
N.I.A. (News In Arizona) and
Free Publicity are welcome but ultimately don't serve to break up the accompanying vocal delivery, which is especially hilarious during the latter. As such the album becomes very tiring, very quickly, and given the 45 minute run-time, most of this album is effectively redundant.
It's no real surprise that this album is pointless, but it's distressing that outside of the laughs the first few minutes of this warrants, there is basically nothing different to hear at all. As most would expect, this is to be avoided.
