Enemy Of The Sun – Caedium (2010)

We are always complaining that we don’t get enough albums that feature band’s trying to push the envelope and develop something new and intriguing. Well, with Enemy Of The Sun we get a band that tries too many things at the same time, and around 85% of the time they are brilliant. “Caedium” continues along the lines of their first full-length album “Shadows”, creating a very chaotic combination of almost EVERY single genre of Metal (and closely related genres).

“Caedium” will surely get trashed by plenty of people, and other will love it, there will be almost no middle ground when a band like Enemy Of The Sun comes along. We must say that we love many of the things, and other things are just downright awful (like the first 20 seconds of “Chasing The Dragon”). However, one thing we will grant to this band is that they have gigantic balls for releasing something like “Caedium”.

Right off the bat, we must say that the vocals 50% of the time are terrible. While we like the aggressive growls, and screams, we totally hate the majority of the clean parts; they should get a vocalist that can be convincingly versatile since Mr. Jules Näveri does a good job half the time.

Moving on to the actual music, the band combines Fear Factory, Sepultura, some modern Metal/Metalcore influences all together with some Progressive and Electronic hints here and there. You would imagine that this mixture would be vomit inflicting, but Enemy Of The Sun manages to pull it off most of the time (minus half the vocals).

Musically, all musicians are very gifted and most of them play/have played in very good bands such as Grip Inc, Leaves’ Eyes, Atrocity, and Pain, just to name a few. There are brilliant Guitar melodies and riffs through the whole release. The bass guitar line is very well crafted and provides a solid foundation to the music. The drumming is very good, except when they resort to some tribal like sections.

The one thing in common from all these songs is that they have clear Fear Factory and Trash Metal influences through the album, other than this every song is very different. There are tons of breakdowns into plain weird sections that sound interesting most of the time. We must say that you definitely need to listen to this album MANY times before fully digesting what “Caedium” is all about.

If you are looking for something weird and intense, you should definitely check out this release. The musicians are brilliant, and their ideas are very interesting. Sometimes their sound gets a bit too chaotic and we love it.

Release: May 28th, 2010

Country: Germany