ENDED – Five Eyes

ENDED - Five Eyes
  • 6/10
    ENDED - Five Eyes - 6/10
6/10

Summary

Sliptrick Records
Release date: April 10, 2017

Sending
User Review
0/10 (0 votes)

Five Eyes is the new album from Sweden’s Ended, their follow-up to 2014’s About To Fall. The new release is the debut of new singer Mickey Berquist, who takes over vocal duties from Lars Granat, giving Lars the ability to move to background vocals and concentrate on his guitar playing. Wise move on their part, as that focus combined with Berquist’s clean delivery provides a much fuller sound than that of the first album. Fuller, but sadly not full enough throughout the ten tracks.

Ended’s Progressive Metal approach is filled with ideas; the songs refuse to sit still and the musicianship is very solid, but the musicianship isn’t enough to mask the fact that there are very few truly compelling songs on the album. The album’s apparent difficulties lie more with the songwriting and the production than they do with the bands’ obvious talent as musicians.

The title track is a promising beginning, and follow-up “Proteus” is the strongest of the release and one of the harder rocking cuts to be found on Five Eyes. All the songs have interesting changes and there are some great individual musical moments from track to track; but those moments rarely gel to form a cohesive song. Berquist’s delivery often gets thinned out in the production, which is a mistake– “Altruism”, for one, is a good track that could have been a much better one with his contribution more prominent. Ended is a talented band and Five Eyes reveals a great deal of promise; if they concentrate on writing and crafting songs to match their chops they will be a band to watch.

TUNE INTO METALEXPRESSRADIO.COM at NOON & MIDNIGHT (EST) / 6:00 & 18:00 (CET) TO HEAR THE BEST TRACKS FROM THIS UPCOMING RELEASE!!!

Author

  • Daniel Waters

    Daniel was a reviewer here at Metal Express Radio. Iron Maiden’s Piece Of Mind wasn’t the first Metal album he owned, but it was the one that lifted the lid off his soul when he received the record as a gift on his 15th birthday. He's been a Metal fan ever since. He's probably best known as the author of various Young Adult novels such as the Generation Dead series and the ghost story Break My Heart 1,000 Times, now also a major motion picture entitled I Still See You, starring Bella Thorne. Writing and music, especially Heavy Metal music, has always been inextricably linked in his mind and career. His first paid gig doing any type of writing was for Cemetery Dance, where he wrote a horror-themed music column called Dead Beats, and when he was writing the first Generation Dead novel he had a ritual where he started his writing day with a Metal playlist that kicked off with “Crushing Belial” by Shadows Fall.

    View all posts

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*


This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

The reCAPTCHA verification period has expired. Please reload the page.