REVIEW: Your Pain is Endearing – Upon a Throne of Hate (EP/2013)
Artist: Your Pain is Endearing
Album: Upon a Throne of Hate (EP)
Everyone has a different pain tolerance; what some people might interpret as excruciating and disorienting another might be able to shrug off as easily as a pinch or poke. Because of this, it’s hard to gauge a true definition for pain beyond that of sensational discomfort. True; a knife wound is likely to be more painful than a paper cut, but even then, the degrees to which the two are different vary from person to person. One thing, however, is for certain: the injuries inflicted upon the listener by Your Pain is Endearing’s most recent EP, Upon a Throne of Hate, create pain and misery which transcend the sliding scale of the “pain threshold.” With intense, skin-flaying technicality and bone-cracking, gut-busting heaviness, even hardened hearts with thick skins will find themselves sobbing and licking their wounds by the time Upon a Throne of Hate is done with them.
Crack. The intense percussion and brutalizing, plodding chugs smash and hammer at the listener’s chest, breaking ribs and bruising organs. Your Pain is Endearing attack the listener with a cavalcade of incessant, dense instrumentals throughout Upon a Throne of Hate which are positively marvelous at rendering the listener’s defenses broken and scattered. “Witness Carnage” starts low from the get-go and proceeds to only sink further and further into the depths of murky, brooding heaviness which Your Pain is Endearing have perfected—dragging the listener helplessly along for the ride. Even the novelty cover of Dr. Dre and Eminem’s 2001 hit, “Forgot About Dre” features more than its fair share of spine-splintering brutality, and flows well enough with the other contents of the EP that the listener might not know at first whether it was a cover or just a curiously named track. Realistically, anywhere you look on Upon a Throne of Hate, there is heaviness and malevolence abound—whether it’s the ominous chugs which kick off “Witness Carnage” or the break-neck drumming throughout “The Taste of Flesh.”
Rip. While the incessant heaviness Your Pain is Endearing bring to the table is busy breaking the listener’s bones and busting apart what armor they might have, an equally deadly technical aspect to the band’s musicianship wages war on the listener’s ears. Razor-sharp shredding and furious fretwork tear skin and muscle from bone and leave gashes wherever they deem fit. The EP’s title track, “Upon a Throne of Hate,” exemplifies this, as does the epic “Genetic Perfection.” Riffs played with unmatchable technical precision tear open the listener’s eardrums and creep inside their head, staying stuck there indefinitely. Likewise, these contagiously catchy segments of stellar stringwork are driven home by some of the fastest and most impeccable drumming the listener will have ever heard. The sheer velocity of the blast beats and precision of the fills is enough to give the listener’s jaw rugburn—this is especially true of segments in “The Taste of Flesh” and, of course, “Forgot About Dre.”
Crunch. As if the listener’s sliced and smashed body was placed in a blender and flicked on to “high,” when these two elements come together, the listener is turned into mincemeat. Your Pain is Endearing use a catchy—but lethal—combination of perfectly honed, razor sharp technicality and pulverizing, ruthless heaviness to brutalize the listener. This dynamic is perfected upon inclusion of the vocals, and the enormous amount of diversity they hold. Favoring a low, visceral bellow, the vocals are capable of reaching up into a stellar, skyscraper scream or a vicious inward howl when needed in order to match the tone of the music. The epic, 11-minute “Genetic Perfection” highlights this, as the screams, shouts and growls are varied in order to prevent monotony. Likewise, when the instrumentation takes a turn for the ethereal, the vocals fade out of the mix, letting the guitars and drums play back and forth—giving the listener a much needed rest after nearly twenty five minutes of relentless battering, bruising, cutting and slicing.
Snap. Squelch. Flop. Your Pain is Endearing ruthlessly break through the listener’s ribcage, tear out their heart and squash it before their very eyes. Upon a Throne of Hate is perhaps one of the most carefully crafted and meticulously molded monuments to heavy music to be released recently—and while you might miss out on excruciating pain and seemingly endless suffering by passing it up, you would also be missing out on what is sure to be one of 2013’s greatest EPs.
10/10
For Fans Of: Annotations of an Autopsy, Sentenced to Dissection, Infant Annihilator, The Mortis Sermon, We Are the End
By: Connor Welsh
