Stingray: Enemy 12"

Stingray: Enemy 12” (La Vida Es Un Mus) La Vida Es Un Mus brings us the third record from this London band. I had only listened to the previous two Stingray records in passing, but that sick-looking Blasphemy-inspired sleeve made me curious about what was going on with Enemy. What I found was a thirteen-minute rampage that’s like a potpourri of metal/punk sub-styles. There are moments that remind me of the Cro-Mags’ Best Wishes, the fist-pumping d-beat of Sacrilege’s demos, bouncy pogo parts that wouldn’t be out of place in the early Toxic State Records catalog, a lot of old school death metal, burly vocals from the Doom / Extreme Noise Terror school, and the occasional sprinkle of unhinged, whammy bar-heavy guitar soloing. LVEUM’s description of Enemy calls it “London on a plate,” and I hear that, both in the record’s dank, cavernous sound and in the way it touches so many corners of the underground. That’s something I associate with UK hardcore; while I think of bands from Italy, Sweden, or Japan as honing a specific, distinctive style, UK bands like Napalm Death, Heresy, E.N.T., and plenty of others seemed to throw all kinds of things into their pot of influences. While that’s certainly true of Enemy, Stingray boils that pot down pretty thoroughly, its concise 13-minute runtime leaving zero room for bloat or unwelcome eclecticism. I’d argue that Enemy delivers on that eye-catching sleeve design… it’s burly, desperate, beautifully ugly-sounding, and bursting with riffs.