Enisum still has much to share.
After three years of silence, the band signed to Avantgarde Music and led by Lys (vocals/guitar, ex-Dawn of a Dark Age), Leynir (bass, Homicide Hagridden, Owls over Oaks), Epheliin (vocals), and Dead Soul (drums) unveils its eighth album, Autumn Embrace.
The journey begins with Nowhere’s icy winds quickly followed by an intoxicating rhythm section as gentle as it is dark, welcoming Epheliin’s screams that accentuate the contrast with the beauty of the atmosphere created by her bandmates. The ethereal break allows us to catch our breath before plunging back in with the shadows guiding our steps toward Autumn Embrace, where the intensity ramps up a notch, particularly thanks to the blast beats and frenzied riffs that rage from the very first seconds of the track. We naturally find the aggressive vocal parts again, but also those reassuring moments of floating calm followed by the resumption of hostilities with impressive naturalness, then our minds lose themselves in the impressive and haunting Oblivion Cave, where the screams become far more menacing and aggressive. The instrumental remains oriented toward majestic tones, benefiting from a touch of soothing dissonance, just like the clear sound that punctuates our progression and guides us toward Woods of Lost Souls, which returns to the aggression and epic tones of the Italians’ Black Metal. We still find ourselves lulled once again by their intoxicating harmonics, yet at the same time surprised by their shifts in rhythm, as well as by the clean vocals that blend seamlessly into the break, eventually letting the distortion take over again as we transition into Miss You, which returns to its clear, palpable melancholy. While the comparison to a ballad seems obvious, the track masterfully alternates between sections to better captivate us, such as when the cavernous shouts echo the roars before the silence that gives birth to Sweet Autumn of Decadence, a track whose tranquility will be of very short duration. The folk roots are accentuated in the leads, and here again the vocals shift from aggression to gentleness in a very natural way, but the track passes by rather quickly, leading us to the final composition, Forest Breath, which begins with a luminous, misty sound but also meanders at its own pace, with that bittersweet sensation provided by the guitar, eager to hypnotize us one last time and brilliantly succeeding until the sound fades away on its own.
If the name Enisum is familiar to you, there’s a good reason for that: over twenty years and eight albums, the band has created a universe as majestic as it is melancholic, and the Autumn Embrace chapter comes at just the right time to add its own contribution to the whole.
95/100