YOUR LAST ORISON

"Your Last Orison" is the debut full-length studio album by multi-national progressive thrash metal act End Amen. The album was released through Institute of Art in 1992. End Amen was a shortlived project founded by Dan Rock (guitars) and Norman Legggio (drums) of Psychotic Waltz, Uwe Osterlehner (vocals, guitars) of Deathrow and Siggi Blasey (bass, keyboards) of Crash Museum, during the collaborative 1992 tour in support of "Into the Everflow (1992)" by Psychotic Waltz and "Life Beyond (1992)" by Deathrow.

The music on the album is progressive/technical thrash metal with the emphasis on the thrash metal part of the sound rather than on the progressive metal ditto. If you are familiar with the last couple of Deathrow albums, the music on "Your Last Orison" is pretty much down that alley, but not nearly as powerful or technical. The progressive metal part of the sound pops up on occasion. It's especially some parts with keyboards that leads my thoughts in that direction and then the title track. It's interesting to note that Dan Rock and Siggi Blasey would actually take parts of that track with them to their next collaborative project Darkstar and incorporate some of the ideas on the first album by that band. However the music on "Your Last Orison" is predominantly teutonic thrash metal with strongly German accented English language vocals. With the musicians involved it's no surprise that the musicianship is really strong but personally I have a hard time appreciating Uwe Osterlehner staccato thrash metal vocal style. The sound production is decent but nothing special.

"Your Last Orison" is not the most cohesive album neither when it comes to album flow or the quality of the songwriting and I'd recommend listening to both Psychotic Waltz and Deathrow over this any day. A 3 star (60%) rating is warranted. This is an example of an album that shifted copies because of the musicians involved rather than the quality of the music.