The End of the World

You're Making It Come Alive (Flameshovel)

By Kim Newman
Published: October 16th, 2006 | 11:12am

Sometimes music grabs your attention from the first second. Sometimes music just disappears into the background, decorating the space like wallpaper so unassuming that you don’t even realize that it’s more ornamental than a plain painted white wall. The End of the World’s disc, You’re Making It Come Alive, is like that wallpaper, cocooning the space in its still sounds of shimmering guitars.

This Brooklyn trio’s dense guitar rock is a lulling trance, so much so that the 45 minutes of sound barely registers beyond its meandering hypnosis. It’s not that the music is offensive. Rather, it’s just boring and it’s difficult to pay it much attention. Maybe you can blame it on the fact that most of the music was written while the band’s three members holed up in Maine. Such quiet solitude doesn’t lend itself to brash experiment.

More likely though is that their skewed trance-rock has been done before by groups like the Walkmen. At times the End of the World’s front man Stefan Marolachakis’s delivery even recalls the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser, particularly on the plaintive “White Sands” and “Spare Me.” Thankfully, this trio finally breaks free of their self-imposed lethargy with “Party’s Over,” a track nestled into the middle of the disc and a welcome jolt with its pop and energy. It’s too bad that they don’t do it more often.