Style: Post-Metal (Mixed vocals)
Review by: Chris
Country: Italy
Release date: October 9, 2020
It seems lately I’ve been on a tour de Italy, especially in the area of ‘ post’ genres, most notably with Nero Di Marte leading that charge right at the top of the year. So far it seems to have convinced me to keep my eye on this part of the world for these kind of releases, and La Fin can be another car added to the train with The Endless Inertia. A 6 piece outfit, La Fin employs a triple guitar setup (which I’ll talk more about later) to create their post-metal compositions. In their words, The Endless Inertia is an album using the metaphor of inertia for the the quiet and stillness in our lives, intentional or not.
The album opens in peaceful post-metal fashion on “Intertia”, with long drawn reverb tails on a soft chord arpeggio, which slowly darkens itself in both tonality and instrumentation while almost throat-singing style vocals further pad the atmosphere. Moments later the distortion kicks in from the other guitars while the original motif is allowed to continue underneath. The motif escapes itself for complementing tremolo picking higher structures, and the vocals turn to The Ocean-esque harsh tones. While what I’ve described definitely is well done on this first song, these kind of progressions are expected of post-metal. The Endless Inertia does has more surprises in its breadth as it continues, however.
“Zero” in glimpses shows an inclination towards a black metal-inspired sound, opening with frantic blast beats before abandoning them for further changes in pace. While the album very obviously has its extreme heavy moments, there are some standout lighter sections for moments to catch one’s breath, such as in the back of “Hypersleep” and “Endless”. The cleaner vocals tend to be pushed much further back and washed than their harsh counterparts, to fit the rest of the instrumentation following a similar trend; in a lot of the lighter sections nothing is necessarily meant to be the true master of the show. Instead, those moment serve as a coming together of the mood, whereas the heavier moments to to trend towards forcing the ear onto the groove/riff or the vocals themselves. I had mentioned earlier The Endless Inertia has some surprises in store; these are mainly sections where the compositions dip into the blackened territory, or when the drums truly have moments of really just going crazy underneath the wall of sound.
I had mentioned La Fin employs a three-guitar setup. This always sounds great on paper, but I do find a lot of bands hamstring themselves in this setup by always doubling parts regardless, turning the extra guitarist really into a glorified double-track. La Fin has a few moments they fall into this, but thankfully for most of the album there are few moments all three guitars seem to be doing similar parts at all. Many times you have harmonization or counterpoint parts occurring between two of the guitars, while the third provides the texture and ambience that would be expected in a post-metal world. The bass and drums provide exactly what they need to, with the bass being the consistently heavy voice to push things along, and the drums doing a great job of bouncing between grooving heavy beats and smoother cymbal focused beats on the soft parts.
For fans of any of the modern post-metal heavyweights this is definitely a solid album, though personally I felt it has a few places it fell flat. I didn’t find the ebb-and-flow of the record as smooth as I would have hoped, and had a few too many moments of soft-part-exploding-immediately-into-heaviness instead of a more gradual development. On subsequent listens many of the lighter sections seemed very samey and blended together over time; this could be purposeful, but it did make me not like those sections as much. It could almost be considered a praise though, as I feel my mind really wanted to get back to the filth and heavy grooves, which have a good many shining moments throughout. As stated earlier, this is another item on the list of reasons I need to pay more attention to whatever is going on in Italy that keeps these albums coming.
Recommended tracks: Inertia, Disembody, Eulogy
Recommended for fans of: Cult of Luna, The Ocean, ISIS
Final verdict: 7/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Argonauta Records – Bandcamp | Website | Facebook
La Fin is:
– Marco Balzano (vocals)
– Michele Banfi (guitars)
– Loris Laugelli (guitars)
– Lorenzo G. Ruggiero (guitars)
– Riccardo Marino (drums)
– Federico La Torre (bass)
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