So Shall It Be

The line between death metal and hardcore punk gets fuzzier and fuzzier, as the full-length debut from this Philadelphia trio makes clear. How It Ends includes only a singer, guitarist, and drummer (bass parts on So Shall It Be were contributed by Neal Chase), but the band's sound is enormous. Critic Robert Christgau once said of Hüsker Dü's first album that it was mood music, only for a very different mood, and the same could be said of this one. What you hear in the first minute or so is what you get for the remaining half-hour: big, crunchy, tightly controlled guitars with tagalong bass, equally controlled stun-gun drums, and tuneless vocals processed heavily to create a slightly less-extreme variation on that demon-in-the-pit sound so familiar to fans of Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel. At first glance the lyrics seem like the same old same old (blood, pain, insanity, no escape, entropy, buried alive, etc.), but upon closer examination they reveal something more complex: several of the songs are direct appeals to God, asking whether the singer has any chances left ("Dying Eyes") and asking him to "end this suffering" ("End the Suffering"), and, in one case, adopting the persona of Christ himself in a weirdly ambiguous (and confused) theological summary ("Thou Shall Not"). None of these songs come across as anything like a statement of faith — in fact, they tend to feel like a rejection of it — but they seem to be built on the assumption that someone is out there to hear the singer's queries and complaints. Nuanced theology isn't exactly what you normally expect from a death metal album. Interesting.