Enlow - The Recovery CD Review

Wow, this is interesting. Dead Poetic sound a lot different when they don’t worry as much about melody and turn down their production values. Wait, what’s that? You mean this isn’t Dead Poetic? Oh, my bad. I kind of figured it was From First to Last with a much crappier drummer anyways. They’re focusing a lot more now on making all parts of their songs crappy I see. Huh? Seriously? This isn’t From First to Last? Oh, well who’d have thought that Beloved’s reunion disc would be as simplistic as this junk. Did they even think they could come close to matching Failure On? Oh no, you’ve got to be kidding me. This isn’t Beloved? It’s Enlow? Who the hell is that? Oh yeah, they were that metalcore band that broke up like a year ago? I remember now. Ok, yeah, I understand. Hiatus, gotcha…

And with Enlow’s return, you get a release that is basically nine songs that sound like a cover band ripping off all of the mediocre parts of Underoath, A Static Lullaby, Saosin, Silverstein, and the likes (and trust me, there are a lot of mediocre parts to grab from those bands). It would be tempting to put this cd into the “listenable” category instead of the “put in the microwave to see the neato blue sparks come out of it when you turn the microwave on” category, but what holds it back is the production values. Gloss this cd up and you can easily get the Underoath and Alexisonfire fans to take it in and give it at least a few spins before they stick it on their shelves full of trendy discs they’ll never listen to again, but since this cd sounds murky and lacks the spit-shine needed for bands in this genre, you can’t cover up the lack of talent with the glimmering sheen of post-production that many bands do.

Is there anything that could possibly pull this release out of the dregs of sucktitude it is stuck in? Sadly, not really. I’m sure Enlow can try to play the old school cred card, but that’s kind of a stretch considering they’ve only released one previous cd and that was less than three years ago. They could pull the “we toured with all these awesome bands” maneuver, but they were only touring with those awesome bands back when they didn’t sound like a neutered metalcore band with lousy screams. No, in the end, no matter what they do, this cd will not be successful because, hopefully, fans of this genre will see how utterly bland and cliché every song is. Then again, these are the same fans that buy Hawthorne Heights discs by the hundred thousand, so it might be a gross overestimation of how intelligent the fans of Enlow’s genre are to think they can recognize how lacking this cd is.

Making a crappy nu-screamo album can’t be any band’s goal, and surely it was never Enlow’s goal with The Recovery, but that’s exactly what you have with this release. There are so few good moments to be heard that you have to feel at least a little sorry for the band, especially after having previously released a listenable effort in 2003. It’s hard to have your album universally trashed, but good can come out of it—they can take everything that’s been said and in a year or so come back to the table and try again, hopefully with better results. Or not, I guess. It really doesn’t matter too much because either way this release sucks.