Emancer - The Menace Within (2005)

Since the bands second album, 'The Human Experiment,' the Norwegian duo of Mithrin and Gorbag who collectively operate under the Emancer moniker have been dubbing their music, 'Extreme Metal Art.' It's not a bad way to describe their music either as its certainly not your usual dosage of Norwegian black metal here, though oddly enough that's how the band began when they formed in 1996 under the Utumno name, but things change, probably for the better in the case of these guys.

When, 'The Menace Within' was released in 2005 it was already the fourth album in four years for this duo and largely I consider it to be their most triumphant moment too. The Menace Within continued where the previous effort, 'Invisible' left off and further explores the ideas expressed therein as once again the listener is treated to an original futuristic sounding melodic and avant-garde black-ish metal release, but there are some slight differences, which have made this band even more interesting.

The most noticeably thing would have to be that the band fully expands on the progressive nature of their music on this release as the sudden changes in speed, the occasional clean guitar and keyboard breaks all seem reminscent of progressive music while the cleanly sung parts actually remind me of Mikael Åkerfeldt from Opeth.

Other differences seem to be more usage of the keyboards to help build atmosphere and to further develop the futuristic industrial sound that Emancer had somewhat become known for at this point in time. Gorbag’s vocals seem to have improved slightly as well, grim and raspy in character, but still perfectly understandable and they even feature some strange effects added to them at times. The drums are also created through the usage of a drum machine, but they are not played at blazing fast speeds, but in fact sound quite authentic, but they also give the music further industrial-ness, which I dig. And of course Mithrin’s guitar work is just fantastic. Once again he creates some very exciting and original sounding riffs that’ll either have you banging your head in delight or you’ll be in complete awe by how cool they sound.

Favorites would certainly include hard driven and catchy opener, ‘Enter Goddamned CNS’ or ‘Volatile Winter’ with its odd James Bond-ish theme like opening, and ‘Enticing Defeat’ has a very nice calmer clean vocal part in it that segues into a great solo and then back to full speed black metal ferocity. However I think I truly admire, 'Reclamation Of Merciless January' since it has an epic sort of build to it and its dedicated to Terje "Valfar" Bakken who had passed away the previous year. Also the final song, 'Explicit Repugnance (of dying)' has a little bit of that epic-ness to it as well, but all in all the damn thing just flat out rocks hard.

Since this album the bands activities have slowed up a bit having only released, 'Twilight and Randomness' in 2008 and been silent since then, but perhaps the next chapter from Emancer is on the horizon. Hope so since these guys have always been fun to listen to.