For anyone unfamiliar, The End is a Canadian band that have established themselves as a math metal powerhouse, similar to a more controlled and brooding The Dillinger Escape Plan. Within Dividia and the Transfer Trachea EP were intense, frantic and at times almost impenetrable.
Someone should have gotten to them earlier, because with three and a half years between albums, The End apparently had time to lose everything that made them who they were. Elementary is one of the saddest dropoffs I've seen from a band that used to be great. But there's no doubt that if you asked the band members about this, they would call it their big "evolution" to a new level, maturing and perfectly honing their sound. That's bullshit, because writing songs that are ten times less challenging and ten times less interesting is not progression. Sounds a lot like the opposite of progression, doesn't it?
Containing hardly a trace of their former work, Elementary relies more on straight-forward metal riffs and easy time signatures. Everyone in The End has proven that they can do so much more, and that's why this music is such a waste of time. There is no excuse for "Awake?", a track that wouldn't be out of place on your local dumbass hard rock radio station, telling you to "Go Rock Yourself" as my local station does. And then in another wild stab at "maturing," they close out the album with "And Always...", which is nothing more than somber acoustic drudgery with too much bombast. Again, absolutely alien to anything The End has ever done before.
To keep with the drastic musical changes, Aaron Wolff has drastically expanded his vocal abilities. His highly affected melodic singing is the most confusing aspect, since he previously stuck to screaming. For the most part, Wolff's vocals are passable, and his screaming is still ferocious, but he deserves a severe talking-to for the verses in "In Distress" where he comes dangerously close to rapping.
The big debate that an album like Elementary brings up for me is this: How much is a band allowed to change their sound before they cease to be that band? Progression is a good thing, especially in music, and if bands never evolved then we'd all get bored quickly. But I refuse the idea that a band can just do whatever the hell they want without any regard to their past. I think that a band has to establish a sonic domain to operate in, if not just for consistency's sake. Because if they don't, then what's the point of calling themselves a band? I believe that a band should be a solid entity that represents a certain brand of sound. Without any glue holding it together, it's just a few guys playing instruments. Oh yeah, and Elementary kind of blows. Can't forget about that.
