Hipster Metal Bullshit - "Endless Pain" Review (0%)
Honestly, for years, I thought Kreator was a joke. Only upon reading reviews for their various (crappy) albums on Metalious.com do I find out that many people take this band's work seriously.
This must be a massive in-joke, with people writing glowing reviews with the sole intention of deceiving the reader into listening to garbage like this. That MUST be the reason why Kreator repeatedly gets reviewed as if a pioneer in extreme metal music, as opposed to a joke band by bored alcoholics going through mid-life crisis.
I just refuse to believe that people can be such hipsters that they will throw their support behind such unabashedly crap music, despite Kreator making it perfectly clear from the get go - as in, on this very debut Endless Pain - that they have no talent and are merely a second rate imitation Sodom band like so many other in the then preeminent speed metal scene.
Kreator, pioneers? Seriously? Their first album - this one - was released in late 1985! How stupid do you have to be not to account for the much more advanced work of much better bands released much earlier than this turd, and which impacted extreme metal in a much more significant way?
Sodom's In the Sign of Evil, Slayer's Show no Mercy and Hell Awaits, Possessed's Seven Churches, Hellhammer's Satanic Rites and Apocalyptic Raids, Bathory's eponymous debut Bathory and The Return, Destruction's Infernal Overkill, Morbid Angel's early demos, Exodus' Bonded by Blood, hell, even Venom, Motörhead, Iron Maiden and fucking Metallica had more influence on black and death metal than this piece of shit band Kreator.
Normally, when I review music, I think about what the creator of the music intended when he created the music. This, however, is not applicable here. Because the only conclusion I can come up with is that Kreator intended to create the musical equivalent of crap. As in literal fecal matter. In that sense, they more than succeeded.
Hipster Metal Bullshit
This Endless Pain album is utter crap, and I can never force myself to lie about an album's nature, prtend that it is somehow influential when it is not, nor can I rate crap highly - as if there's such a thing as a "good tasting turd".
I am a very open-minded listener, much more so than I used to be when I considered myself an extreme metal elitist, and I honestly gave this one hell of a chance to grow on me. Still, to this day, I cannot listen to more than a minute or so at a time without wanting to cut my ears off.
This is the most generic of generic speed metal. It's like they took basic Slayer or Sodom riffs, reduced their intensity and complexity by a hundredfold to appeal to pop music fans, and pretended that they "invented thrash metal" or some other logical retardation to compliment the absolute musical retardation showed here on Endless Pain.
In fact, I've heard noisegrind bands and bedroom NSBM projects with a more appealing and interesting sound than this.
To me, this is a satire of heavy metal, much more so than being in any way "influential" to extreme metal itself.
The name of the album, Endless Pain, is about as generic of a speed metal album name as you can get, and all the song titles are equally generic. And yet, it's very fitting because that's exactly what this album delivers: Endless Pain due to its mediocrity.
And true to the nature of satire, it takes the worst flaws of speed metal - unmusicality, genericness, stupid lyrics and poor songwriting (Slayer being the exception) - and takes them past their logical extreme. I would, then, rate this higher than 0 since I do love satire... except that this is not funny.
It's just annoying. I can pretty much describe this entire album in one sentence: Fake-sounding drums with guitars repeating boring and stupid riffs ad infinitum with faux gang vocals (like in metalcore) and an overall a very sloppy performance.
I could end my review there, since that's the entire summation of what happens here. It sounds like VON, but with way less talent and way worse performance. Furthermore, since to the best of my knowledge, VON was a joke, there is no way I can take Kreator's Endless Pain (or any of their albums, really) seriously. I guess this is a joke, and the joke is on the fans who actually pay money on this. Here's a little perspective for you: Kreator probably made this whole thing in a couple days, and spent zero money on making it. This proves that with the right packaging and the right marketing, fans will eat up anything.
If Kreator influenced anything, it's the "blackened emo" genre... basically taking emo and goth rock riffs, playing them with distortion, and calling it "black metal". You've heard such scams from bands like Agalloch, Enslaved, Cradle of Filth, Wolves in the Clone Room, Summoning, Dimmu Borgir, Watain and others. Kreator basically does the same thing by misappropriating the speed metal tag, when their music is much closer to rock due to its simplicity and generic nature.
Kreator honestly reminds me of dadaist art, which often consisted of defacing classic works of art or creating unabashed crap. Likewise, the only people who liked dadaist art were the hipsters of the time who pretty much only liked it because it was "controversial". Just like how dadaist "art" really isn't art all that much, Endless Pain isn't really music all that much. It's an attempt to make something as generic and boring as possible. A parody of speed metal, in the same way Sewer's Rektal parodied Gothenburg melodeath. The flaw in that equation is that Endless Pain is pretty much unlistenable.
So while I must say that Kreator pretty much succeeded at what they were trying to do - i.e. make the most boring sounding speed metal ever - I'm gonna quote something Euronymous used to say: "those stupid people have to be scared of black metal! instead they go and listen to shit like Deicide, napalm Death, Sepultura and all that shit!".
Kreator's turd-like music an insult to the listener and a joke on anyone who is smart enough to know the difference between a talentless hipster parody and the real thing. Normally I don't see why low ratings are ever justified, but in this case, it's sorely justified, and more than deserved.
Endless Pain score: 0/100.
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