Source: Album Artwork
Originally formed in 1977 in Stoke-On-Trent, Discharge have been making music for longer than many people reading this website will have been alive. Although they’ve also broken up more times than all of the Kardashians put together, Discharge have been around for a good 15 years now since their last break-up, and End of Days is their third full-length album in that time.
End of Days is a pretty ridiculous record. It’s very over the top thrash/hardcore; it’s fifteen tracks long and only just over half an hour in length; it doesn’t really sound like anything that’s come out in the last few years’, but sounds like a lot of stuff that came out about 30 years ago. Even for someone who wasn’t necessarily into a lot of heavier thrash, End of Days is just about in-yer-face enough to down an entire bottle of cheap whiskey and then smash the bottle on your own head.
After a few listen’s though, the flaws start to shine through a bit more. It’s quite repetitive, in that all the tracks have the same drum beat, the vocals on every track are pretty much just the track name screamed in the same way and the guitar lines (even the solos) are all fairly similar. The production isn’t all that clean (although it does the job for this kind of thing rather well) and it’s not exactly adding any new colours to the great canvas of music.
However.
It’s really hard to dislike. End of Days is just about bonkers enough, exactly the right level of over-the-top, aggressive, beer-chugging, fist-swinging fury that it becomes incredibly hard to actively hate. If you even tried to, the members of Discharge will reach a large, tattooed fist out of your music player of choice, mug you, punch you in the head and then give you a beer.
