Death meets Doom. A classic combination which is always somewhat promising to my ears as I have come to consider this one of my favorite genres of all time, because it mixes many things I like – melody, darkness, growls, heaviness, some blast-attacks. Austrian newcomers Endonomos deliver all of this on their self-titled debut full-length.
Whenever listening to well-done Doom-Death (or is it Death-Doom) I love the way the musicians are able to convey that sense of darkness, of death and despair by going heavy and yet melodic. Basically being a paradox unto itself it can be wondrously welcoming. A reverberating semi-acoustic passage following some really heavy riffs can be the best thing ever, especially if its level of distortion grows and if a shifty, irregular drum pattern joins in and the guitar then frenzies out into a full-blown solo thus initiating the next heavy part! Oh wait, I just described the structure of ”Atropos”, my favorite song on Endonomos.
What was supposed to be a solo-project by Lukas Haidinger, who used the pandemic to write the foundations for this record, later turned out to be a full band-adventure after his three fellows joined in creating a highly organic and clearly following common patterns but all of that with an exactness and adoration for the classics that this never turns into a pure copy-paste-machine but a band that should be loved by genre-fans and the idols themselves. Thus I wouldn’t be surprised to find Endonomos on tour with Celestial Season, Cathedral, Pallbearer or Ahab, as the quartet would be a perfect opener for any of these.
They just know how to convince people, just listen to the beginning of ”Rejoice” when alone acoustic guitar is limelighted and then, slowly, really slowly an electric guitar line shines through from the background and as soon as both, acoustic melody and electric riff, are really parallel the blastbeat drums kick in (literally) and the whole thing is a real “joy” to listen to! The one thing they might work on is the clarity on the growls as they are little too unclear, which on the other side gives them that little extra credibility! And the clean vocals are really very well-performed and integrated into this beast of an album. They carry the despair, while the growls carry the anger – and together they are the reason, why one must congratulate Lukas for this performance.
Please do not expect any happy-go-lightly lyrics on this one, per se impossible on a record of this genre, but rather ”A sea full of doubt” - as the songs deal with our personal and social decay, our common deadly future, which inevitably will be upon us sooner than later, especially given the way we deal with our planet and our society. ”Joy to the world / the lord is gone”, well why should he stay if we’d treat him bad anyway? We are alone on this planet as our time for real, meaningful interaction is gone and we cannot restore this place and us for the better. Man had its time to be good to each other, so we can also blastbeat it all away, right? Mankind has undergone an evolution at first, but now we are on the way down, on a devolution.
Endonomos are a very good genre-newcomer and will be loved by people who love any of the aforementioned bands and could also very well be something for people who only need one or two (or eight or nine) new death-doom-bands every year!
