There isn't a lot of music that legitimately terrifies me anymore, so when I found the first the End record in a box in my basement the other day I figured I'd toss it in to see if it still held up after all these years. I borrowed Transfer Trachea(...) from a friend in High School and made the mistake of listening to it one night when the house was empty and especially dark. It was the most tense and terrifying 22 minutes of my teenage years up until that point. Somehow this bunch of weirdo hardcore kids from Ontario had wrangled a complete nightmare and captured it on tape (Digital...whatever...I dunno).This record is so off the wall. Spazzy and heavy as hell with these strange moments that, had they not been so dissonant and weird, lull you into a false sense of calmness only to be destroyed again by absurdly aggressive blast beats and screams. The singer in this band is for lack of a better word, fucked. His scream is so intense and punishing. It's the type of scream that can't be taught or faked and you know the guy has probably coughed up more than his fair share of blood. He eventually quit the band and went on to form Mare, but I was lucky enough to see the End before that. If he was terrifying on record, it was magnified 100 times live, careening around the stage assaulting his band mates and the audience. At one point he grabbed a friend of mine, flipped his long black hair over his head and screamed right in his face. Later I asked my friend about this, and he told me that the singer had rolled one eye back into his head, followed by the other. Seriously....a fucking nightmare!
Anyways, check this album out. It's definitely not what I usually post, but I think it's strange enough to capture my attention despite not really loving metal that much.
P.S. It still scares me as much as it did when I was 16.
~AB
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