“We were refined in the fire, bent and contorted to aspire.”
Rising to prominence in the mid-2010s after vocalist Dan Watson exited controversial tech-deathcore outfit Infant Annihilator, Enterprise Earth are a band that I’ve been familiar with, and a fan of for quite some time now. Now four albums deep into their career, it seems the group are intent on evolving with the times, rather than staying stagnant. This much was clear on 2019’s stellar Luciferous, an album that ramped up the melodic factor for a band that, for the most part, were traditionally anything but. Of course, there were brief glimpses of melodicism (notably on passages of “Kiss of the Recluse” and “Patient Zero” from 2015’s Patient 0), but nothing quite as stark as the fully clean bridge found on downright gargantuan closer “There is No Tomorrow” from that 2019 album.
Now, three years following, Enterprise Earth, along with a major line-up shift, notably after founding guitarist/songwriter BJ Sampson departed the group in 2019, are here to show the world they aren’t going anywhere, and they certainly aren’t afraid to keep evolving. At a whopping 70 minutes, it’s easy to let the daunting runtime turn you off, but I promise that The Chosen is worth each and every one of those minutes, if you’re willing to give it the time, despite some admittedly glaring issues in parts.
The Chosen opens with lead single “Where Dreams Are Broken”, which admittedly acts as a bit of a litmus test to see how much you can stomach here, both for better and for worse. Coming out of the gate swinging with some ferocious double kick work, and the frenetic riffs to match, the track quickly transitions into a head-bobbing groove as Watson lays down his signature gutturals and piercing high-screams in droves. I’ll admit, the album’s one major issue rears its head fairly immediately here, though: Watson’s clean singing.
While I believe the clean vocals on Luciferous, and in parts across The Chosen were handled by guitarist Gabe Mangold, it seems Watson was intent on taking the reins on that front here, to extremely mixed results. Don’t get me wrong: his lower, more subdued register is serviceable. He can clearly hold a pitch, and has improved greatly since his early adoptions of clean vocals (see: Mire Lore, his cover of Veil of Maya’s “Three-Fifty”), but it’s in his pitched scream-singing that things start to get messy. The vocal tone is fairly unpleasant, and it feels that he’s scratching the very top of his vocal range at all times during this chorus giving a scratchy feel to the whole thing. Luckily, this vocal style only appears a couple of more times throughout The Chosen, and no time past this feels quite as egregious. Still though, it does add a fairly harsh damper on my enjoyment of an otherwise stellar deathcore number.
Jumping ahead a couple of tracks to “Unleash Hell” is where the album seriously picks up steam, however. One of the many welcome, soaring guitar solos across the album features here, and while the strangely Avenged Sevenfold-esque guitar work seems like an odd influence to meld with downtuned, djenty deathcore on the surface, it makes for a surprisingly great blend. Harmonized leads darting around the fretboard with ease, Mangold truly excels on here, and on The Chosen as a whole. His breadth of guitar styles alone across the album impresses, too. From the soaring alt-metal inspired soloing and chugging djenty goodness of the aforementioned “Unleash Hell”; to the pick-up-your-feet two-steppy thrash-inspired riffs on “You Couldn’t Save Me”; to the groove-metal and djent influenced bounce of “Skeleton Key”, there is a masterful palette of guitar styles utilized across The Chosen that helps each song stand out in its own way.
Midpoint track “Overpass” stands as another major highlight, opening with one of the softer passages across the record, with both vocalists trading off over a haunting clean guitar-driven backing. This is, of course, until classic Enterprise Earth mode kicks in on the track’s second half, with the song coming to a close after a surprise feature from Kublai Khan TX’s Matt Honeycutt, and one of the most downright disgusting breakdowns I’ve ever heard in my life. On that front too – don’t take my waxing lyrical about their heightened melodicism as a signifier that this album is soft. Quite the contrary, containing some of the most brutal riffs and breakdowns I’ve heard in deathcore in recent years, the sparing melodicism used on The Chosen only adds weight to those downright violent moments, of which there are too many to count.
Penultimate track, and the album’s namesake “The Chosen” closes out the record in a truly epic fashion. Serving as the album’s true closer (with final track “Atlas” being a short, ambient instrumental), the title track feels like a true culmination of each and every element of The Chosen wrapped into a planet-sized package. Brutal blasting and downtuned chugging; juxtaposed by the track’s gorgeous symphonics, and one of the better uses of clean vocals across the record line the experience of the colossal nine-minute runtime of this closing track. While the relatively cheesy “get the fuck up” callout leading to the track’s closing moments feels a tad cliche, it works in giving an otherwise ridiculously brutal album a relatively uplifting and energizing ending, and left a lasting positive impression on me long after the album had closed out.
With The Chosen, despite its main glaring flaw in its clean singing, I believe Enterprise Earth have crafted their strongest work to date. A masterful 70-minute romp into the world of beautifully melodious deathcore, while I believe Watson’s higher register could have done with some more time in the oven, it hardly proved to be detrimental to my experience of the album as a whole. Containing some of the best riffs and breakdowns I’ve heard in this genre in years, along with Watson’s world-class screamed vocals, The Chosen is an absolute delight from start to finish, despite a few hiccups along the way.
The Chosen will be available this Friday, January 14th via eOne, and you can pre-order the record here.
8.5/10