You are a cultured, discerning, ambitious twenty-something. You belong to the class of people in this world who have been bestowed with that helping of intellectual and personal ambrosial fodder we call "taste". Part of your good taste just happens to encompass the realm of music. As a youngster you went through many phases musically. You had your punk rock phase, your hardcore phase, your singer/songwriter phase, your ska phase (come on, own that), your metal phase, your rap phase, your classical phase, your pop phase, and your Rodgers and Hammerstein phase. Now that you've graduated from a small liberal arts school and moved to your painfully hip, painfully tiny New York apartment decorated with posters purchased off of patentpendingindustries.com and stocked with furniture that is at least apparently vintage, you've passed on from the phased life and broken through to a new and blindingly unfettered existence in which you are free to dip your hand into the brimming vats of each and every genre and withdraw that which you see fit. DJ Shadow now nestles comfortably on your shelf next to the Flaming Lips, and Le Tigre is all buddy buddy in the record bin with Led Zeppelin. This expansion has of course forced you, the young, aspiring, but still financially limited professional/grad student/scenester/slacker to screen each genre more closely for the true pick of the litter. Because if you're honest late at night nestled snugly in your IKEA sheets, you know that your diversity is not just a result of your magnanimous, special, semi-divine, naturally uberhip disposition. You buy all kinds of records because that's what cool people in our day and age do. You have to be able to both simultaneously and nonchalantly discuss fuzz pop, death grind, hip-hop, and several British groups with one word names no one has ever heard of (pure invention works well here, try using mundane body parts), all while pretending that you were really into music in the eighties even though you were only eight in 1989 just to be any kind of a hit at a dinner party these days. At this point in the review you may find yourself asking, "Where does this rabbit-hole lead, o great one?" Rightly so.
I confront you with the reality of your situation and bring up the vat analogy because Undying's new album, At History's End, lies far towards the bottom of the metal/hardcore cauldron and it's my duty as your friend, elder and better to explain that to you. Gone is the passion that poked through in places on their first record, The Whispered Lies of Angels. Gone is their scary singer with the shaved head whose name I can't recall, replaced by Logan White, who although she delivers the best female hardcore vocal I've heard in a while still fails to sound remotely unlike the fourteen thousand other hardcore singers out there. Gone, I assume, is the jolly 6'4" guy covered in tattoos who worked their merch table and did cartwheels in the pit. Gone is ANY variation in drumbeats. That's right. Eight songs; one beat. You do the math.
No my friends, save your hard earned cash. Take your special someone out to dinner at an upscale vegetarian restaurant. Make a deposit in your "I'm saving for my first pair of Diesels" bank account. Buy something from Japan or that at least passes for being Japanese. Do the things the hip feel they must do. Because we both know that your current lifestyle leaves scant opportunity to bring out the metal. When you do, best do it right. Buy a Hammerfall disc instead of this.
1.5/4
