Chuck Schuldiner Project

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Ende - The God's Rejects

Upon the shore, waves roll in a gentle and reassuring rhythm. Buried underneath the current, however, is a sentient and emergent something that should not be. With this, we're brought into the world of France's Ende on The God's Rejects, which itself was buried in 2008 and has only surfaced this week.

While Ende look back through several generations of black metal for their inspiration, the way they keep this four-song-twenty-minute-demo varied throughout shows a more well-rounded tool belt than their insular ancestors. After the aforementioned short intro, the first track, and a large portion of the album overall, draws its strength from a deliberately plodding pace rather than the relentless blast-beats of their contemporaries. Ende is slow in the same way Michael Myers is slow; they are in no rush, as your demise is assured.

Throughout, there's a push-pull dynamic with genre tropes that keeps this from being black metal by numbers without descending into falseness. While the production is what we've come to know and love, there are, among other things, tasteful/appropriate guitar solos, parts during which one could conceivably mosh, melodically clean bits, crushing doom, and moments of Portal-esque complexity so dizzying that this reviewer had to pause the album to make sure another song wasn't accidentally started elsewhere.

As rain falls to this planet, a factory-sized beast groans its protest as it returns to slumber, and, with that, Ende leaves us to wonder: if this is what The God has rejected, how great was what he found worthy?

Here's Ende on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/ENDE.official


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