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End > III > Reviews
End - III

END: "III" - 70%

skaven, December 1st, 2011

After multiple spins, End’s third album - simply titled as III in the same vein as the previous two - starts to show how diverse the record actually is, despite how gray it sounded in the beginning. The simple black & white cover art nods to a rather basic underground black metal formula, but III is surprisingly detailed and almost progressive. Yeah, I could even mention Opeth here when it comes to certain beats and guitarwork here and there.

So, what is to be expected of III is frenzied, authentic black metal with rather professional and bassy sound, vocals going from high-pitched screams to masculine growls similar to Mikko Aspa, and even some acoustic guitars (”In the Womb of Sick”, ”Ugly and Bygone”) among the distorted ones that are, by the way, played very well. The menacious melodies are played with ease, making the album sound a well-rehearsed totality. The drummer deserves a mention here, too, due to the successfully powerful battering that is groovy at the same time. A down-side, however, is the fact that the drum sound is somewhat muffled: for example, the snare drum could do better with some more snare mat.

Song-wise, III is at times brilliant: the rather slow and brooding ”Still in Flesh” sends chills down my spine and ”Lavish Gloom” rises nicely to a melancholic climax, for example. But compositional stagnancy is to be found here, too, unfortunately. In spite of all the many ideas that are provided - III is far from being repetitive or anything - there are moments when the riffs simply don’t have enough power (the first half of ”Megalomania”). But no worries, most of the album’s 50 minutes are still worth hearing, keeping the listener enough interested.

I find it hard to name any similar bands, in all honesty. For who I would recommend III? That’s a question I’ve been pondering since listening to the album for the first time. I guess I could throw Si Monumentum era Deathspell Omega here as a reference point, just don’t expect that deeply evil and dissonant music - a more rocking version of it, this could be said to be. Anyhow, III is definitely above an average black metal album, that is for sure.

3.5 / 5
[ http://www.vehementconjuration.com/ ]

We've not heard the End of this - 68%

autothrall, September 29th, 2011

Well it turned out that the first End wasn't the end, and that the second end also wasn't the End. Six years beyond that, the End arrives once more in its third manifestation of precocious, storming Hellenic black metal. Immediately, End III trumps its predecessors with vastly superior cover art. No more a gray, empty miasma will adorn the band's face, but a hooded mystery within a gorgeous, rich black and white woodland illustration. Points there for drawing in the listener's eyes, but unfortunately, End III does not musically hold up to its elder chapters. Not because the band have somehow devolved in ability, but because the dark atmosphere and mood characterizing the sophomore is much reduced here, supplanted with some study assembly line blasting that sounds like a hundred other acts in the field.

I'm not saying that the prior album was brilliant in its balance of dark ambient pieces, dour acoustics and more aggressive surges, but there was a particular charm to it that I enjoyed. On the End III, it takes even a few tracks just to encounter something interesting. "Catastrophe" has a half-decent, discordant breakdown in the bridge, but it's largely just a straight burst of blast with angry sounding sheens of higher string axe-work and growling. "Self-Eating Mass" moves straight into another blast-beat, though admittedly it lets up in its bridge for some sparser guitars. After this, the album starts to take on more variation. "Still in Flesh" and "In the Womb of Sick" feature, slower, dissonant guitars, not unlike a Glorior Belli or a simplified Deathspell Omega. In fact, there's a lot of this post-black appeal to the album, as it's also incorporated into "Lavish Gloom" and "Megalomania". To some extent, this is a more modern and experimental effort than the previous Ends, but it's not walking on untrodden ground.

For its production alone, End III is superior to what the band have previous released, as the guitars get a good even tone and the vocals sound more piercing or cavernous as the voices shift between growls and bloodied rasps. It's competent and technically more involved than that 2002-3 period, in particular the tighter drumming and the complexity of the guitars. But in the end, it's not all that harrowing of an experience, and despite End II's crudeness, it was at least appreciably haunting. End now seem to have the skill and penetration needed to rub horns with the faster, furious acts out of Norway, Poland and France, but it's hard to remember much of the 50 minutes of dissonant, devilish dissemination on the recent End of their evolution.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com