Prog-Nose

Release: 2009 Style: metal fusion/avant-garde Label: Musea Records Website: http://www.itstheend.com/ Contact: Playing Time: Cat. N°: MP 3093 Review by: Misha Translated by: Rating: 7/10

It's the End is a new powerful metal fusion trio from Oslo, Norway. This is their first album, but they show already a wonderful musicianship. Their music style is a quite up-to-date and innovatively played fusion, blended with metal and free improvisations. It is something halfway from Gordian Knot to Allan Holdsworth. It sounds refreshing and sometimes even intriguing. Mostly it reminds me of another young metal fusion band, the Counter-World Experience from Germany, which is also reviewed here on prog-nose earlier this year. All members of the band contribute in composing, all three of them play guitar and bass. I guess, you will have to see them playing on stage to decide who plays what and where, if you find it important.

It seams that the album consists of two parts. There is this quite persuasive first part, with strong, inventive and tightly composed fusion numbers. Especially the 3rd one, “The Sickness Onto Death Part One” impresses most by it’s catchy guitar hook, changing rhythms and heavy guitar and drums arrangements, next to jazzy parts in between. “Drakes Equation” is a little too long, but is still a good number. Then comes the acoustic and a little abstract, but fine “Marihuana By Night”, which ends the first part of the disc.

The second part is a collection of more abstract, avant-garde or improvised numbers, not necessarily connected to each other. The record looses its momentum here. Some songs are obviously too long and some are even too repetitive. “The Salesmen Are The Real Whore” is build around a quite dramatic melody, but has almost no development in it, except of the necessary improvisations. Considering its 7 minutes length, it makes the song just tiring.
“Deep Fringe / Campfire Caboodle” is composed from pieces of different music styles, switching from one to another by the way a radio can be tuned to different stations. It could be an interesting number, if not the unnecessary “campfire caboodle” thrown in it, during the whole composition: sounds of somebody opening a beer tin, clearing his nose etcetera. It’s a shame to waste a song like that.

Luckily, the rest of the compositions on this part are more enjoyable. Check “Internal Combustion” or “Xenophobia” with their fusion sound, pierced through by heavy metal guitars and drums, as if arguing with each other. I like the wink to Fripp in “Xenophobia”, a soaring guitar solo that could very much be produced by the master himself, in his better years. And “The Sickness onto Death Part 2” is damn beautiful, just like the part I. Listen to the spoken words in the intro, serious stuff.

7 from 10, but: it’s the beginning, and a very promising one.

Tracklist: 1. Three Quarks For Muster 2. Inverted Implicitness 3. The Sickness Onto Death (I. Part One) 4. Basic Inceptisol 5. Drakes Equation 6. Marihuana By Night 7. The Salesmen Are The Real Whore 8. Xenophobia 9. Internal Combustion 10. Deep Fringe - Campfire Caboodle 11. The Sickness Onto Death (II. Part Two) 12. Tautological Torment

Musicians: Drudge Composer, pianist, guitarist, bass player, programmer, engineer and producer. Retch Composer, vocalist, guitarist, bass player, programmer, engineer and producer.]]] Quibble Composer, guitarist, bass player and drummer.

[Aangemeld door misha]