Enon Chapel - Enon Chapel

By Justin C. Before we get to the band Enon Chapel, we’ll take a quick history lesson of Enon Chapel, the church built in 1823 in London. The chapel’s Reverend Howse allegedly offered cheap burials, but then stacked bodies like firewood in a vault underneath the chapel itself.

By Justin C.


Before we get to the band Enon Chapel, we’ll take a quick history lesson of Enon Chapel, the church built in 1823 in London. The chapel’s Reverend Howse allegedly offered cheap burials, but then stacked bodies like firewood in a vault underneath the chapel itself. After discovering this very-unwise burial arrangement, the bodies were eventually removed and buried in a mass grave, and the resulting scandal--plus a population surge that was filling cemeteries to bursting--helped prompt several Burial Acts to be passed, banning further burials inside the city of London. You can imagine that the bereaved who thought they were giving their loved ones a proper, Christian burial were not pleased with what was discovered.

So Enon Chapel the band--funeral doom, right? Nope. This is a 27-minute blast of black punk/thrash, a side project of a site favorite, Balan (the man behind Palace of Worms and a collaborator in Botanist), and Meghan Wood (Crown of Asteria, Iarnvidgur). Wood provided the lyrics, vocals, and most of the guitar solos for the project, and Balan handled the rest of the instrumental duties.

The sound could be superficially described as lo-fi black metal, but it strikes a balance between grit and quality recording. As you might expect, the album opens with some church bells, chants, and eerie, echoing guitar, but the duo doesn’t overplay the atmospherics--they have some more serious ripping to do. The songs, although generally short, pack in plenty of tempo changes and contain an excellent mix of black metal vocal styles, tremolos, and good-old, syncopated thrash riffs.

I don’t usually get excited about projects labeled as black thrash, but this one dances effortlessly between the two genres, as well as a host of other influences, while still keeping a foot firmly in the realm of barn-burning metal. The guitar solos are also worthy of note. Unlike so much forgettable weedly-deedly nonsense, they’re melodic and ferocious at the same time, and they clearly belong to the songs they’re in, rather than simply being an interruption for showing off.

This EP was a happy surprise for me, and although another lo-fi black metal project about corpses could easily be overlooked, I hope people find this and enjoy it as much as I did. It may not be a revolution, but Balan and Wood absolutely nail they style they’re working in.