Big fan of the cover art for this one. Even bigger fan of the fact that the music matches the cover in its majesty and complexity. The Endless is the fifth studio LP from Colorado doom metal and post-metal unlikely upstarts, Dreadnought. Their sound is akin to a cross between Pelican, Isis, and Procol Harum, with periodic black metal vocals, drawing not-too-surprising influence from groups like King Crimson, Opeth, and Moonsorrow. The Endless is an exploration of, conversation with, and at times flight from, man's essential duality- a creator and destroyer, a divinely endowed creature burdened by its freedoms, crying out for deliverance only to find the chains of vice grow ever tighter with the resonance of his wail, knowing only emancipation through submission in a cowering shade, ceasing his struggle so that the occasion never again arises for him to curse the bite of the irons that weigh him down. Either the body depresses and encumbers the soul, or the soul repudiates the body- whichever is the more acceptable death determines the winding path you take in life to get there, and with every step a little drizzle of the psyche eeks out between your toenails; whether it boils like tar returning to the Earth, or soars like a dove once it escapes the shelf of your little spurs, is a fair indicator of where the rest will follow. A splendidly moving and disturbing premonition of fate and the consequences of habituation, as ensnaring, troubling, and poetically melancholic as the dark churn of juxtapositions that fires the cauldron of Dreadnought's auditory dispensation of the braided, interminable whorl of salvation and despair, in whose eye lies the human heart, bleeding and pleading with spite.
