As much as I love post rock music, one of the funny things about it is that most bands that play this music genre have definitely original band names. It's like, a sentence long name, or something. It's very strange. This is also the case of Everyone Dies In The End, a Richmond, VA, USA based post-rock, post-metal, doom-gaze, instrumental band featuring ex-members of Lord By Fire.
Keith, Jeremy, Jason, and Luke, the four members of the band, have just released their five-song début album titled All Things Lead To This; put simply, they are an instrumental quartet with song titles as long and complex as the post rock tradition requires. Starting from the album title to song such as ‘There Are Bigger Things Happening Here Than Me And You’ and ‘Stay Alive No Matter What Occurs, I Will Find You’, the words they use concur to create dark and gloomy atmospheres that dominate the entire album.
Long songs – the shortest track lasts 8 minutes - droning structures, ambient effects, textured surfaces, repeating rhythms and powerful crescendos are the main characteristics of Everyone Dies In The End. Each track flows into the following one and the whole composition seems like a unique big diamond that shines differently according to the face you look at.
Beginning with ‘There Are Bigger Things Happening Here Than Me And You’, the band shows immediately their notion of sounds as shapes and their ability to fuse sounds of ambient, post rock, space rock with elements of shoegaze without ever forgetting the melodies they set forth.
Every track is a work where each adventure is separated by the intros that are like interludes before the eruption of ambiance, distortion, melody and madness. ‘Stay Alive No Matter What Occurs, I Will Find You’ has the same tone throughout its first 10 minutes before exploding in the wall of sounds of the remaining two minutes where the four –piece band demonstrate the talent to push the boundaries to create something different. It’s a nice song that I would appreciate more if shorter.
‘I Will Tell Tales Of Your Compassion’ and ‘Who Are You, Whom I So Faintly Here?’ build slowly and strongly. With the most emphasis on percussion and bass in the beginning, the pulsing introductions culminate in endings that are really good and will blow your mind, especially if you’ll experience them through your headphones.
All Things Lead To This ends surprising us with a song that take the opposite path compared to the previous songs. ‘We Bears Are A Proud Race’ starts with repetitive and pursuing guitar riffs and the alternation between the tremolo-picked melody and the outright noise gives a rhythm to the whole song that has been stuck in my head since my first experience with it.
Without venturing in to anything completely original Everyone Dies In The End display acute instrumental sensibility, using synths with guitar-battering crescendos and proving their talent and their potential to go beyond the classic post rock.
