It’s Monday and Mondays suck, so let’s grind it out with a full album stream of The Sound That Ends Creation’s latest, Music To Give You Ideas… Incase You Should Run Out Of Ideas.
You are traveling to another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but of math, horror, grind, death and beyond. You are about to enter the grind time zone.
If you read this column even semi-regularly, the name The Sound That Ends Creation should be familiar to you. The Monday Grind covered Roses, Thorns and Dead Unicorns last year, and it was one of the most unique pieces in the column of 2018. So much so that it landed on my best of 2018 year-end list. A furious mix of grindcore, death metal, jazz, and mathcore. Humorous at points and biting at others. Other sites like Decibel, Mathcore Index, Toilet Ov Hell, and Heavyblogisheavy covered the band as well. In fact, Christian Segerstrom from Mathcore Index premiered a video from this album on Mathcore Index only a few weeks ago. And it’s awesome.
The project is all one man: Chris Dearing, who not only writes all his own music but mixes it and masters alone as well. And for those that have been following previous albums, yes, they have sounded great for one man produced records, but Music To Give You Ideas… is his most unhinged, chaotic and professional sounding record yet. And writing-wise, it’s also his most accomplished.
Music To Give You Ideas… is a Twilight Zone episode. And while the intro “Oldies, Mexican Jazz, Or Mathcore” helps to establish that, a feeling of unrest and paranoia is maintained throughout. Now the intro only about 20 seconds. After that we get “The Human Race Makes Mistakes You're The Worst I’ve Seen So Far” and the chaos drenches the speakers. A thing to note is the use of piano throughout Music To Give You Ideas…, which is on every track drawing out horror and paranoia in every corner it can weave itself into. Piano was on previous The Sound That Ends Creation records plenty, but on here it is integral to every track.
The thing is, Music To Give You Ideas… is very much a metal horror album in scope. The album is incredibly challenging but also inviting in how one peels back its layers. The first few listens to this record are probably going to be pure adrenaline shots for a lot of people. Settle into its madness though and you might start to wonder how good some of the raw piano tracks might sound linked up to an abridged version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It is debatably what makes this record more shaking than previous entries.
Sonically, Dearing spares nothing. It’s 14 lethal injections of chaos that keep on giving. Take “Shoving An M80 Into A Super Wasp Next” and how it feeds right into “Pulling 562 Teeth All At Once.” The first fades into the next and the mixture is chemical combustion. But that’s also been an angle of The Sound That Ends Creation. Melding things together that are jarring to the point of bursting. Both tracks hit hard, both have their catchy bits. The breakdowns in “Shoving An M80…” are as heavy as hell, especially the ending one. “Pulling 562 Teeth All At Once”, however, crushes skulls its breakdown about halfway through. It’s one of the most intense moments on the album.
The jazz is also still plenty present from previous albums. “A Town Living In Fear Of Roosters”, for example, has a real jazzy flow. Oh, there’s plenty of death moments, but this track jams. The scales, moving into the grind, flowing into a real funky breakdown, then moving into “A Bloated Toad Choking On A Fly”. A track that keeps up the jazzy funk, keeps things mathy and gets really chaotic with its deathgrind.
Music To Give You Ideas… is another brilliant release from The Sound That Ends Creation. Dearing continues to set his bar very high for himself. Most five-piece bands don’t write music this intricate or challenging. In an email, Dearing told me that this album is “Lyrically, the album is based heavily off of The Twilight Zone (as you'll notice when you start it up), and the mental strain that comes with putting your heart and soul into art.” Having read the lyrics, I can agree that there was absolutely mental strain in this. And I think that more than a few people can relate to the writings to some extent if nothing else on a broader scale.
The album concludes with a small exercise in logic from The Twilight Zone. And I won’t spoil it, but it is something to ponder when the album wraps up. It’s an important concept. In the meantime, get grinding on this!
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