Ennui – The End Of The Circle

Band: Ennui
Title: The End Of The Circle
Label: Non Serviam Records
Release Date: 5 September 2018
Country: Georgia
Format reviewed: High Quality Digital Promo

ENNUI was formed in 2012 by David Unsaved (guitars and vocals) in the city of Tbilisi. Serj Shengelia immediately accepted to be the second member of the band back then, by playing guitars and bass. That said, the Georgian duo now delivers their fourth album, “End of the Circle”, containing three (!) songs with a total running time of 1 hour and 13 minutes! EPIC, slow, mind-blowing. Deep. Just standing in the slumber of times. The album comes after three years of intense work since band’s “Falsvs Anno Domini”, released in 2015.

Special guests on the new album are John Devos (Mesmur) playing drums and A.K. iEzor (Comatose Vigil) who marks his participation with writing the lyrics for “End of the circle” track. The album was mixed and mastered at by George Bokos Grindhouse Studios Athens.

The whole “End Of The Circle” delivers unique doom/death/funeral doom atmosphere where the listener suddenly and easily drowns and falls deeper with each minute of the play through. It is a grandeur sonic atmosphere actually! The prolonged tracks carry some cosmic peace and tension at the same time, profoundness and wisdom of the ages. Dark, melancholy and grieving, the three tracks can encompass and encircle a whole existence in a “dramatic and poetic storytelling”. The riffs are crushing, the vocals are ultra heavy and the tempo is predominantly slow (naturally). Still, there are a lot of melodies and sorrowful passages. Melodies which create and add tragic images and bitter taste, making the listener to relive forgotten pains and lost hopes. The album really digs into the one’s soul, seeking for all the lost opportunities and once joyful memories, which from the distance of time have been turned into sweet but roaring pain. Because nothing can be the same again and nothing can return. The past is something we can only live with and only the tears can remind us we lived it. And it all has withered.

The band describes their new effort as “it’s the darkest, inventive and extreme music written by the band to date. This is the opus about the death and funeral of all being, existential madness, and final cycle in a whirl of life and death”. Trivially, but I couldn’t agree more on that description.

I really enjoyed “The End Of The Circle” very much. Very profound, vast, immense. An album excellently performed and recorded; with devouring sound and tones of heaviness. For some unexplained reason it brought me back at the beginning of 90s when the genre has just begun to be shaped by Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, Anathema, and Katatonia, Decoryah, plus another ten more underground bands, playing slow, sorrowful and heartful music. Maybe the memories and the past were playing tricks with me? Well, some might argue a lot on these comparisons; I’m giving you what I thought of while listening to the record. Of course, newer names instantly might be added to that list. For now, I’ll just leave for everybody to discover ENNUI’s music alone. Highly recommended. 8.5/10 Count Vlad

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8.5/10 To Greatness and Glory
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