THE SOUND THAT ENDS CREATION - Memes, Dreams, And Flying Machines (Review)

Written by: Izzy

It’s a little known fact to those who don’t know me personally, but I LOVE MySpace. In general, the whole aesthetic of scene stuff is right up my alley, but I especially love the music that came out of MySpace. No, I don’t mean Soulja Boy or (and I am trying my best not to vomit as I type this) Jeffree Star, those two are just memeable novelties that never actually contributed any genuinely good music to society. What I’m talking about is the amazing mathcore/grindcore/deathcore scene!

There are so many weird forgotten bands birthed from that website that deserve wayyy more credit than they ever got. Expect me, in the future, to dive more into that mystical realm we call 2009, where Warped Tour was the best thing ever to happen to music, where everything was neon colours and everyone had the emo fringe. But right now it’s still 2020 and we’re talking about The Sound That Ends Creations, a MySpace-core revival band of sorts, with their oddly titled latest album Memes, Dreams, and Flying Machines. There’s a very clear and obvious inspiration both musically and aesthetically from that era, which does inform a lot of my opinions about this album, so I see no issue labeling them that, and I doubt they would mind.

Also in the event that Chris Dearing, the man behind The Sound That Ends Creations, is reading this:firstly, I’m sorry, secondly, don’t let a schmuck like me deter you from making music and following your passion, because from this point on I am going to mercilessly tear into this album, but I promise it’s nothing personal.

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You’d think I’d be all over this idea, right? Well, no, I think a MySpace-core revival is a horrible idea and TSTEC is basically every reason why. Up until this point I can confidently say I have loathed everything this band has put out, there is neither the songwriting talent nor the tact and creativity that made the original scene so phenomenal. There was a sort of “lightning in a bottle” energy that scene had which I don’t think is possible to replicate in the current year--although some bands have certainly tried and produced some amazing music in the process. See: TheCheeseBurgerPicnic.
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Now if you’ve been reading carefully, you’ll notice I implied I didn’t loathe this one, and you would be correct. There is one thing this album does that leaves me a little stumped on how I should feel about it. You see, this isn’t just your standard mix of high pitched screams and dissonant chords: it has JAZZ (and for the record I use that term very loosely in this context). Most of the songs posses, underneath the standard metal instruments, some piano and horns presumably mimicking whatever the guitar is doing most of the time, and occasionally will go full out and make a switch into these brief, clean sung sections that attempt to create a mangled but vaguely recognizable silhouette of jazz. When you lay all this out, it sure seems like an intriguing concept, even if mathcore and jazz have rubbed shoulders countless times before, but this is where my feelings get mixed.

Do I take this as a positive and give the album some props for doing something unique, or do I take this as a negative and go even harsher because this flimsy experimentation just adds another unnecessary layer of instrumentation to an already claustrophobic and aimless album in order to make Memes, Dreams, and Flying Machines seem more interesting than it actually is? I have no plan on listening to this album more than the handful of cursory listens I gave it before writing this review, so that question may be left unanswered, but I wouldn’t worry yourself because either way, it’s such a bland, derivative, and unexciting album that no amount of wEiRd AnD wACkY riffs or avant-garde jazz-whatever can fix it.

​Everything here just sounds like the same section over and over and over with messy layers of audio that leave you unable to even tell what the individual band sections are doing, until “oh look they slowed it down and did a guttural” or “oh look they went jazzy all of a sudden,” feigning the existence of any substance in this album. I feel my brain rotting listening to it, because at one point it just became nonsensical white noise, you can get this same experience but much, much better from bands like the aforementioned TheCheeseBurgerPicnic, or The Great Redneck Hope, or The Sawtooth Grin, etc.

Maybe I’m reading too deeply into this, but to me the mere existence of this album is making a statement, that while other bands dwell in dynamics, it can do what its forefathers did and deliver you a million notes per second for 18 minutes while barely ever hitting the break and still end leaving you feeling fulfilled. The sad truth is no, it does not live up to the long lineage of amazing MySpace-core bands that preceded it, it does not feel like a fully realized album, it does not leave me satisfied or feeling like it did everything it could in its brisk runtime. I reiterate:  The Sound That Ends Creation are not TheCheeseBurgerPicnic, they are not The Great Redneck Hope, and they definitely are not The Sawtooth Grin. They are a cheap imitation with sparkly theatrics.

To end this monumental review off, I want to say that I don’t think it is bad if you enjoy this album. Maybe it just sounds good to you in a way it doesn’t to me; maybe it’s just a guy having fun and making music that’s just meant to be dumb fun. Just because I find no enjoyment in the music presented here doesn’t mean nobody is allowed to, and I applaud Mr. Dearing for not only creating a name for himself but doing it as a solo artist on top of that. I can barely figure out how to use a DAW and here he is with 5 albums under his belt already.

Closing statement: I really really really REALLY do not like this album. The end!

The Sound That Ends Creation - Memes, Dreams, and Flying Machines was released Oct. 2nd, 2020 by Dark Trail Records
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The Sound That Ends Creation can be found:
Bandcamp
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