END AMEN “Your Last Orison” /CD/

The only full-length studio album by German-American Progressive Thrash Metal band.
End Amen were a side project from members of Deathrow and Psychotic Waltz - two of the biggest names on the Progressive Metal scene. Line-up consist of: Uwe Osterlehner - vocals/guitars (Deathrow); Dan Rock - guitars (Psychotic Waltz, Darkstar); Siggi Blasey - bass (Crash Museum); Norm Leggio - drums (Psychotic Waltz, Teabag).
This album did a lot to establish a running trend in Germany lasting for 4-5 years, the Progressive Thrash Metal wave, which produced some of the finest bands of the 90s: Depressive Age, Lost Century, Megace, Skeptic Sense, Entophyte, etc. 
Deathrow's last effort "Life Beyond", released the same year, was a fairly decent, but hardly exceptional follow-up to its mighty predecessor "Deception Ignored". Uwe Osterlehner, the main man behind the latter album, was apparently not satisfied with the results, and decided to give himself one more chance to reach Progressive Metal heights, and he managed to apologize with quite a style for the not entirely convincing swansong of his main act. Deathrow's touring partners that same year were the American Progressive Metal wizards Psychotic Waltz, who were following on the positive reception of their sophomore effort "Into the Everflow". Still, this album wasn't as compulsively great as their brilliant debut "Social Grace", seeing the band abandoning the more aggressive shreds for the sake of sprawling, Psychedelic, abstract song-structures and riff-patterns. In other words, both acts were beyond their creative peaks (not really beyond life yet, fortunately), and this fact called for one more temptation, for Osterlehner the last creation he would put his name under, and for the Psychotic Waltz guys the last production which could be labelled as "Thrash" before their complete surrender to the more accessible and more digestible. Apparently all the men involved were aware that this would be their last opportunity for real Progressive Thrash greatness, because the album begins in such a brilliant fashion with the first three compositions that if the whole of it had been sustained in the same level, we would have been talking "Deception Ignored 2" all these years...
Consequently, this album is "a beast" of its own, sounding like a distant, not very legitimate, relative of the two bands' magnum opuses. At the same time its rich atmospheric undercurrents didn't quite serve as a rigid template for the other bands from the wave to follow, but the more initiated would be able to see influences from past achievements in the genre, like Hexenhaus' "Awakening" and Toxik's 'Think This". Its unique mixture of hard complex Thrashing and sinister keyboard sweeps could have been elaborated on; the guys could have given it one more try, if not for them, at least for the fans, but the disillusionment was already too big in the Deathrow camp for anyone to be interested, and the Psychotics were already too spaced out to get back to normal. It's a shame End Amen couldn't take off into something more than a one-shot. Frankly, though, it would have fallen on deaf ears at the time it manifested. So this was the beginning, and the end...
If you find yourself enthralled by the works of Mekong Delta, Watchtower, Calhoun Conquer, Paradox, Depressiv Age/D-Age, and later Deathrow, then this is certainly something you would value in your collection!!
Institute Of Art Records, 1992 (RTD 397.0001.2). Bootlegged replica. Used (cover/disc): EX/EX.


Tracklist:
1. World In Decay 5:44
2. Prisons Of Posterity 4:53
3. End Amen 5:39
4. Rebirth 5:58
5. Mystic Mountains 1:30
6. A New Day's Absurdity 7:04
7. Nocturnal March 4:55
8. Your Last Orison 4:52
9. Silence 3:00
Total playing time: 43:37 min.