It's the End
s/t
Musea Records

It's the End are clearly a band with some talent who, in an attempt to cover the plethora of musical genres that they are quite obviously into while simultaneously trying to be overly-clever with their compositions, come across as being seriously self-indulgent and have offered us a debut album that sounds as though it would only ever find an appreciative audience in some 3am pretentious-as-hell jazz bar. Most of the material on here just sounds too samey and, with boredom setting in very quickly, the album struggles to retain attention for any length of time. It doesn't get much more boring than on "Internal combustion" or, likewise, much more incoherent than on "Drakes equation". And I don't think I've ever heard a worse metal rhythm guitar tone! I'm sure that It's the End would go down a storm on The Fast Show's Jazz Club where, mercifully, we're only exposed to a minute or two of bands' pretentious twaddle. I'd certainly get a good laugh out of that. I'm not laughing, however, after enduring 80 minutes of this pretentious crap, and as closing track "Tautological torment" (a perfect summing up of the album as a whole) winds down, I sit with the onset of a headache and I'm glad that now, it really is the end.
- John Norby