Enslaved - E

The already daunting task of following up their progressive masterpiece of this decade, In Times, for the steadily improving Enslaved was exacerbated soon after the album’s release by Herbrand Larsen’s departure, and his substitute could not have come in at a seemingly more high-stakes time as of late for the band, having to build chemistry again with the pressure to improve upon one of their best albums.

E shows the same competence and comfort in the progressive vein of black metal, even including a more tangible viking metal flair than what they had been previously displaying, but unfortunately it also falls noticeably flat in the songwriting department, more formulaic in aspects where In Times played by its own rulebook, and tragically overrun with severely disappointingly drab vocals. Indeed, within each idea they flesh out and stack atop others within each song, the band play as tightly as ever and often come through with wonderful melodies or magnificent swells of dense, synth-orchestra-assisted instrumentation such as the introductory guitar passage that starts the album and the somber echoes of guitar haunting the middle portion of “Feathers of Eolh”. But much of the album is more transparently calculated and unchallenging than it is progressive, washing over with many of the same kinds of sounds Enslaved have indulged in over their career, and more importantly, stagnating to cause the same general mood to purvey across the album. Enslaved wielded chaotic musical changes across vast compositions over the course of In Times, truly earning the mark of “progressive”, but on E they sound timid and even predictable in multiple places.

While In Times had me thinking that Enslaved were condemning Opeth to their self-inflicted relegation to 70′s prog worship, replacing them in their niche of progressive black/death metal, E has me wanting both bands to come around with improvements next time (not that I have any principle issue with Opeth’s style change; it’s just clearly unambitious and they are better at progressive death metal than retro prog rock). I’ll emphasize, though, that I do still quite like this album, more than most of what I’ve listened to this year, but it just felt like Enslaved could have definitely done better because they have. I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.