When browsing the shelves of your music shop of choice, it’s very likely these days to see a big, fat sticker slapped onto the front cover of most albums in order to draw the buyer’s attention. Most of the time, they’re loaded with outrageous claims made by the label in order to cheat consumers out of their hard-earned cash; I’ve witnessed gems such as “An amazing blend of epic melodies, Death Metal, and straight up American Metal!” on a rather dull Winds Of Plague album, and absurd, money-grabbing statements like “The most BRUTAL album of the year” on an Emmure album (Fucking EMMURE?? Really???). Other times, you may find the far overused “For fans of… (Insert generic band(s) that’s currently popular with scene kids here)”. I even spotted an album recently that featured a label saying “For fans of Metallica and As I Lay Dying”; These two bands couldn’t be further apart sonically, which either shows that this particular record company (I didn’t check, but I would bet my life that the culprit here is Victory Records) is either (A.) Desperate for money, or (B.) Run by idiotic twats. As much as I loathe these stickers and their lies, I found it ironic that the day I found that particular sticker was also the day that I found the very first one that contains a 100% legitimate, accurate statement. The band was Enfold Darkness, the album was Our Cursed Rapture, and the obligatory sticker stated “For fans of The Black Dahlia Murder and Cradle Of Filth”.

This, really, could not be ANY closer to the truth. Enfold Darkness plays a diverse, rapid-fire form of Blackened Melodeath that often toys with technical riffs and occasionally turns out a full-on Tech Death track in the vein of The Faceless or Necrophagist (And what do you know, that handy sticker even says “Seen on tour with The Faceless”!); Exaltations Pt. I & II could have easily made it onto a modern Technical Death Metal album, and Pt. I is vaguely reminiscent of Necrophagist’s To Breathe In A Casket. The tremolo-picked riffs are mostly in the vein of Melodeath bands like TBDM, and the Blackened Moments (Which are most prominent on In The Galeries Of The Utmost Evil) are reminiscent of bands like CoF and Dark Fortress; hell, even the vocalist sounds similar to Dani Filth. Okay, let me revise that: he sounds almost EXACTLY like Dani Filth. You’re probably assuming by now that Enfold Darkness isn’t much of anything original, and you’d be absolutely right if you guessed that. But the appeal of ED (I just realized that this is one of the best band acronyms ever!) doesn’t lie in their original songwriting ability, but in the way they pay homage to their favorite bands and combine all the sounds together into something that’s not often successfully pulled off as well as it is on Our Cursed Rapture. Of course, all their influences (so far as I can tell) are from rather modern bands, so any old-school Metal purist will undeniably hate this, but the rest of us should find it easy enough to shut up and enjoy the ride.

If you’re a fan of at least one of the above mentioned influences, you should definitely check this out; If you’re a fan of two or more, then you can pretty much buy this blindly. Our Cursed Rapture is hardly unique at all, but it is very entertaining, and it firmly places Enfold Darkness on the map as a new Extreme Metal act to be sure to watch out for. Let’s just hope they can learn to rely on something more than the sound of the bands they emulate, as it’s something that likely won’t appeal to many after this album.