EP REVIEW: Gather & Mourn – END & Cult Leader
Bringing together two of the meanest, most miserable and arguably finest hardcore bands in the world today, Gather & Mourn feels almost unfair. END’s debut full-length Splinters From An Ever Changing Face reared its ugly, spiked head amid the relentless bleakness of 2020 as perhaps the most fitting soundtrack to that entire year, while CULT LEADER’s A Patient Man, released two years prior, has already become something of a genre classic through its marriage of math, grind and sludge to equally oppressive Waitsian gloom. This short split EP is the first new music from each band since either of those releases, and however you may feel about the format it’s hard to deny this is a salivating prospect.
It doesn’t disappoint either. Asking for a scant 13 minutes of your time, Gather & Mourn is a work of jaw-dropping nihilistic fury that sees both bands operating once again at the height of their powers. END kick things off with the previously released Eden Will Drown and it’s an absolute monster. Driven along by drummer Billy Rymer, it’s bewilderingly angular and chaotic, but also not without two obscenely crushing breakdowns which hit with all the more force thanks to the sheer frenzy which surrounds them. The band’s next effort, The Host Will Soon Decay, takes a more measured approach, centring on more of an industrial stomp that shows there’s more than one way to be world-endingly heavy. If anything, this one hits even harder, its gargantuan, pick-scrape-laden breakdown running the risk of listener obliteration before CULT LEADER have even had a turn.
Eager not to be outdone, CULT LEADER tear straight into the bristling Ataraxis, and honestly it could stand up to any of the most feral tracks on A Patient Man. A short, squealing, sludgy beast, it wraps up a sub-two-minute runtime with a devastating breakdown over which vocalist Anthony Lucero harrowingly declares “In this place I am loved / In this place I am not / In this place I am loved / In this place I am the carrier of corpses”. Unlike END however, the band largely double down for their second offering. It might have been nice to see more of a callback to some of the mournful fare found on A Patient Man, but Long Shadows still scratches a suitably sadistic itch. It is more atmospheric and dynamic, building to a climactic, blackgaze-esque flurry before ending the record in a wash of distorted guitars.
As for a quick note on production, there’s not much to say here other than this sounds exactly as this music always should. Mastered by END guitarist Will Putney, and with mixing duties shared between himself for his own band and CONVERGE’s Kurt Ballou for CULT LEADER’s side, you’ll find no finer pair of producers in all of hardcore. Much like most of the rest of their respective work, Gather & Mourn sounds thick and heavy throughout, balancing a sharp, squealing rawness with just enough polish to ensure that each and every one of its hits land exactly where they need to.
It would be easy enough to lament that this release isn’t a little longer, but that’s kind of beside the point. No doubt both groups will be back soon enough with more substantial full-lengths of their own – and given their track records they will surely be brilliant – but in the meantime Gather & Mourn offers a wonderfully bleak little stop gap that holds up with just about everything these bands have produced thus far. We may have expected nothing less, but here lies further proof that these two bands have already left some indelible marks on hardcore as we know it today.
Rating: 9/10
Gather & Mourn is out now via Closed Casket Activities.
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