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ENDLESS
Mad Sick Mind

Necromance (2018)
Rating: 8.5/10

In my opinion female vocalist Darkyrie has some of the most lethal growls and sneers in the business, making Endless one hell of an extreme metal outfit.

This Spanish tag-team of terror has been active since late 2011, resulting in five consistent full-length studio albums to-date. The latest, the bruising Mad Sick Mind, is a heavyweight attack that throws punches like boulders and jabs like harpoons. This is some seriously thick, layered and brutal death metal built upon those enormous vocal scowls which literally lap away feverishly at the grinding riffs of Enrique Prieto.

The only issue I have with these guys is the programming, which pretty much erases any real earthy drum assault. But for the most part this is one fuckin’ hostile record that’s impossible to headbang to because it’s so fast and volatile.

Darkyrie is a formidable character; her bellows and chesty emissions weave their way through the flurries and thrashes as tracks such as ‘Destroy My Life’, ‘Mad Sick Mind’, ‘I Feel Nothing’ and ‘Know Yourself’ rage upon dense rolls and flash with orchestral effects.

Mad Sick Mind is not an overtly complex album, but rarely does a track rest on one tone or groove. Instead, we get numerous shifts as sporadic gushes couple with crushing heaves before a steely yet gothic effect comes rushing to aid the ambush. ‘Inner Beast’ is a fine example of that marrying of sweeping samples / effects and heavyweight pulverisation as the guitars froth like oceans of grey madness.

Endless are very much modern by design but weighing down the listener with those stern collaborations of instrumentation and styles, so that while the death metal core is fluent and dominant there’s a sudden ache of cold, grey melody in a spiralling lead or immense groove shuffle.

Mad Sick Mind is just one formidable wall. It stands like a behemoth, muscular and casting long, bleak shadows while Darkyrie beckons from atop the wall like a goddess of ghoulish nature, utterly belligerent as she barks through that massive mesh of tumbles and fog on ‘Where Is Your God?’ and the ferocious ‘The Extinction Of The Species’.

I also don’t know how this duo can construct such gargantuan slabs of punishment yet at the same time almost caress the listener with such dark waves. Maybe it’s those orchestral streaks which flare up? But the production values must also be noted too, because while the record provides so many flurries of anguish, angst and aggression, it is all fused together in a sort of fluffy coating whereby there’s no real glimmering gloss. And yet Endless prowl a chasm far removed from fusty death metal values. So somewhere in-between, the band has created a world in which to breathe and radiate vast clouds of density where an instrumental delicacy such as ‘Part Of God’ can flow into the raging yet serene waters.

Mad Sick Mind is a bulldozer of an oeuvre that grabs and smashes you with weight, blistering instrumentation and Darkyrie’s powerful demon throat.

Neil Arnold

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