End Of Green – The Painstream

 

Band: end of green

Album: The Painstream

Record Label: Napalm Records

Release Date: 16 August 2013

Reviewed By: Mark Booth

TRACKS TO DOWNLOAD: “Hangman’s Joke”, “Standalone”, “De(ad)generation”

 

Well its been quiet on the western front for awhile and then BOOM…I’ve got a Napalm Record German invasion on my hands! Been given albums by Deadlock, End of Green, Powerwolf and Saltatio Mortis to review for you the lovely readers of AATR and my fans which I know there are many!!!

So first up is End of Green with their 8th album ‘The Painstream’.  Now I will be honest and say that I had never even heard of End of Green or that they released 7 albums previously and I wondered why. So with a little bit of digging on the band I found out why that might be… To my horror I found out they were labelled as Gothic Metal!  Now I have nothing against Gothic Metal as I love a few Paradise Lost albums (although not heard their latest stuff) and I love the My Dying Bride album ‘The Angel and the Dark River’. However, nowadays Gothic Metal can mean bands like HIM, Evanescence, Lullacry, Marilyn Manson or were they going to sound more like earlier bands like Bauhaus, Fields of the Nephilim, The Sisters of Mercy etc…

 

So with trepidation I put End of Green ‘The Painstream’ onto my iPod and pressed play…was it as bad as I thought? Well the album opens up with “Hangman’s Joke” and I must admit I was pleasantly surprised as the song was actually more like Paradise Lost, Tiamat, Anathema and even a bit of Rotting Christ (circa A Dead Poem album but without the growled vocals). I think that the band aren’t as Gothic as the internet make out. Yes they have lyrics about loneliness, depression, pain, death, heartache etc but that doesn’t automatically make you Goth? I don’t like labelling bands beacuse if I like it I like it…doesn’t matter if its black, death, thrash, hardcore, punk, djent, goth, Viking etc. However I think if someone asked me to label End of Green I would say Dark Rock/Metal. The band like to call themselves “Depressed Subcore”, which I will ask them about in my upcoming interview (see the website).

 

The album is 50 minutes of Heavy Dark Rock (almost Doom laden in parts), however a criticism I will make of the album is that it seems to get a little to weak towards the end. The last two songs on the album (Miss Misery & The Painstreet) might have been better if they were interspersed in the album. These are the slowest and more symphonic tracks on the album and seem to bleed into each other a little and I wish they had finished the album off with a dark explosion instead of a little whimper, but I don’t pick the track listing or order. The album is well produced and crisp and the vocals range from Paradise Lost (One Second era) and Anathema to a more bass tone like Pete Steele, will the music is a hybrid of Paradise Lost, Anathema, The Kovenant (in parts) with a dash of Type O Negative, Tiamat and Moonspell.

 

This album wont have you banging your head and pumping your fist or wanting to start a circle pit as that isn’t the aim. However if you want a slab of dark sombre metal then you could do a lot worse than checking out ‘The Painstream’ and I will be looking into some of their previous albums as its always nice to have a variety on your iPod, CD Player etc. (The version I got to review didn’t include the bonus tracks so I cant comment on these).

 

SCORE – 7/10

 

Track Listing:

01. Hangman’s Joke

02. Holidays In Hell

03. Standalone

04. Final Resistance

05. De(ad)generation

06. Home On Fire

07. Death Of The Weakender

08. Don’t Stop Killing Me

09. Chasing Ghosts

10. Miss Misery

11. The Painstreet