Enforcer - Zenith

That's a bold strategy, Cotton

I've never actually reviewed them up to this point, surprisingly, but people who follow along on this blog instead of just reading my stuff on MA should know by now that I'm a pretty big fucking fan of Enforcer.  Since I started publishing official Best Of lists at the end of every year, starting for the year 2010, every single Enforcer album released during that timespan has finished in the top four.  Diamonds in 2010 was my #2, Death by Fire in 2013 was my #4, and From Beyond in 2015 was my #3.  They haven't been particularly prolific over this past decade, but their streak of astoundingly consistent excellency has kept them on my radar ever since I first heard them, and I've been waiting with bated breath for this latest offering, Zenith.  How could I not?  They've never even moderately let me down before.

I don't start reviews with big monuments of praise like that unless I'm about to be let down.  I've been doing this a long time, I'm aware of my patterns.

Yeah, Zenith is super frustrating because it's both good and bad, and mostly it's just a massive letdown because the band has almost wholly abandoned what they're good at.  For the uninitiated, Enforcer were god damned six hundredth degree black belts in 80s throwback speed metal.  They didn't quite play that distinctly German sound of early Helloween or Blind Guardian.  Instead they had a weirdly North American flair akin to Exciter or Razor's first album, the kind that never quite veered into thrash but would've clearly been a huge influence if they had actually existed in 1981 like they sound.  Despite that, their ear for catchy hooks and choruses was absolutely unreal, nailing this early trad metal quality of making these songs fast and intense while also being maddeningly catchy.  I always felt like an outsider saying this, but I always felt like they had an understated but notable influence from glam as well.  Dead serious, something like Death by Fire sounds like a hypothetical truce between Metallica and Motley Crue before doing rails of blow and covering a bunch of Raven songs.

And that's where Zenith comes in, because that subtle glam influence that I noted back then has suddenly become the only god damned thing the band wants to do.  This is frustrating because honestly it's not like the band sucks at mid paced anthemic glam metal, "Die for the Devil" is unbelievably ear catching, as is "Sail On".  They're decently good at emulating Def Leppard and Bon Jovi.  The problem is who the fuck wanted this??  What schmuck heard "Death Rides This Night" or "Below the Slumber" and said "man this band is good and all but they'd be a thousand times better if they just stopped being so energetic and focused entirely on catchy hooks and forgot every single other thing about their sound".  Zenith is the sound of a band absolutely slamming on the brakes with both feet and flipping a u-ey so hard that their car comes a few millimeters from tumbling several times.  Death by Fire was faster and meaner than Diamonds, From Beyond was darker than Death by Fire, they seemed to be on track to accidentally inventing thrash metal a second time and then just decided to give up and write Girls, Girls, Girls instead.  This is so frustrating, I can't imagine this being what any Enforcer fan was hoping for after a four year break in the release schedule.

I realize that this is coming off similar to my thoughts on Skeletonwitch last year where my complaints basically amounted to "They changed it so it sucks now", which is a total non-complaint in a vacuum.  I get that, but I feel like the key difference in my complaint is that unlike most traditionalist whiners afraid of change, I welcome change and evolution as long as a band doesn't abandon what they're good at, and that's exactly what Enforcer did here.  That speed and adrenaline is just totally gone here apart from two notable tracks.  That's not to say these songs aren't spirited, because they definitely are.  The band does not sound like they're going through the motions here, even the lamest of these songs (apart from the ballad "Regrets", which is a complete flop) feels like the band put their entire hearts into it.  "Die for the Devil" is genuinely great, and could have been a massive radio smash back in the halcyon years of glam several decades ago, "Forever We Worship the Dark" is a hook-filled monster, and I think "The End of a Universe" has some incredible vocal acrobatics that help it stand out.  But at the end of the day it's just regular-ass catchy heavy metal/hard rock with a few good hooks and great vocals, which is something that scratches an itch now and again and that's about it.  It's just extra disappointing when taken in the context of this band's career as a whole.  In a vacuum, I can say this album is decent with a song or two that really stands out, but when you take into account that this is the capstone of a band that absolutely dominated the decade with an iron fist on the backs of balls to the wall frothing speed metal, this just sounds like them closing out the decade with a pitiful bunny fart.

I will give credit where credit is due though, and that's the tracks "Searching for You" and "Thunder and Hell".  The former is admittedly a total cocktease because the verses are primo classic Enforcer, with all of the fire and speed that made them so superlative in the first place, but the chorus itself is a hard left turn back into the midpaced glam that populates the rest of the record.  It works much better here as a contrast to the blistering verses instead of just being another part that fades into a song that doesn't stand out much on its own, but it's still kind of a disappointment that they couldn't keep it up the whole time.  That's where "Thunder and Hell" succeeds, because that's the one and only track that could've fit right at home on any of their previous albums.  "Thunder and Hell" is 100% what I had hoped Zenith would be.  You could argue that I'm just a lunkhead who wants more of the same since this sounds very similar to previous classics like "Undying Evil" or "Midnight Vice", but dammit man that's the exact reason I fell in love with the band in the first place.  This is what they're good at.  Full speed or no speed man!  Go absolutely fucking wild and damn the torpedoes!

So yeah, this is an incredibly frustrating album.  "Thunder and Hell" and "Searching for You" sound like classic Enforcer and unsurprisingly absolutely smoke, and "Die for the Devil" and "Forever We Worship the Dark" are examples of how their new sound can work masterfully.  But the rest of it is just... not what Enforcer should be doing.  I get it, this album isn't for me, and I don't really like it all that much because it's not what I wanted it to be, and you can say that's a childish reason to dislike something and I'm doing this album a disservice by not being "objective".  But the truth is that that's the real reason we dislike almost everything we dislike, isn't it?  Reviews are subjective by nature and music evokes an emotional response, it's not a fucking math equation that you can spit out true numbers to truly assess.  It's qualitative, not quantitative.  If you want the "objective" analysis of the album, I could just say it's generally midpaced with little atmosphere that focuses on competently written and played hooks with a few random bursts of speed.  But that's a short and shitty review, and the truth is that all of those things need to be taken into the context of what the band had done before, and the hard pill to swallow is that Enforcer is merely decent at this style, and they became decent at one style at the expense of ditching a style they were the best in the world at.  If that doesn't sting just a little bit as a fan of what they had accomplished before, then there's no hope for you.


RATING: 44%