NEVERMORE — This Godless Endeavor (review)

NEVERMORE — This Godless Endeavor album cover

Album · 2005 · Thrash Metal

5/5 · 2023-04-01
UMUR

"This Godless Endeavor" is the 6th full-length studio album by US power/thrash metal act Nevermore. The album was released through Century Media Records in July 2005. It´s the successor to "Enemies of Reality" from 2003 and features one lineup change since the predecessor as Steve Smyth has joined as a second guitarist. Smyth was at the time fresh out of a stint touring with Testament, but he had also played with both Vicious Rumors and Dragonlord before that. It was always the band´s intention to have two guitarists in the lineup, but they struggled throughout their career to find a permanent solution to compliment Jeff Loomis, which meant that the guitar parts on several of Nevermore´s albums were solely recorded by Jeff Loomis (among them the two direct predecessors to this album).

"Enemies of Reality (2003)" was recorded on a relatively small budget, as a consequence of being the last album Nevermore owed Century Media Records under their original contract, and many fans/critics felt especially the production standards of the album weren´t up to par with the Andy Sneap produced "Dead Heart in a Dead World (2000)" ("Enemies of Reality (2003)" was produced by former Queensrÿche guitarist Kelly Gray). The situation created a bad working relationship between band and label and the recording and promotion of "Enemies of Reality (2003)" suffered from it (not that it´s a bad quality album by any means). Nevermore and Century Media Records were however able to patch up their differences and a new deal was signed, and Nevermore were able to bring back producer Andy Sneap for the recording of "This Godless Endeavor".

The change of producer is audible right from the first notes of opening track "Born". The dark, gritty, and raw sound production of the predecessor has been replaced by a clear, fat, and crushingly heavy sound production, which has Sneap´s signature written all over it. It´s an incredibly well sounding production and it´s hard to argue against Sneap and Nevermore being a match made in heaven...

Nevermore have released several strong albums in their career, but "This Godless Endeavor" stand as one of their crowning achievements. Not only is the sound production perfect for the music, the musicianship are also on an incredibly high level on all posts. The drumming is strong, organic, and powerful, the bass is heavy and helps drive the music forward, and the guitars produce one killer riff and blazing shredding solo after another, while lead vocalist Warrel Dane sings his paatos filled and powerful vocals with great passion and bite. The music can be labelled the most thrashy and heavy US power metal you´ve ever heard, or US power metal influenced thrash metal with a great heavy groove. It´s both heavy and fast, and both edgy and more melodic. The icing on the cake are the intelligent and thought provoking lyrics dealing with subjects like religion, philosophy, society, and artificial intelligence. The latter subject matter is dealt with on "Sentient 6" which is one of the album highlights. It´s an unconventional and actually quite progressive power ballad (or at least it opens in powel ballad fashion), which opens with ominous sounding piano notes and Dane telling a story about a sentinent who´s mission it is to kill humanity, but at the same time it envies human´s ability to dream, because it longs to be more than a machine. About half way through the track, it gets both very heavy, but also very epic.

Other tracks on the album deserving a special mention are "Final Product" (the lyrics dealing with the commercial exploitation of a dead celebrity) and the closing 8:55 minutes long multi suite title track, but there´s nothing on the album which is sub par, and it is one of those very rare albums where every track is of a high quality and feels right on the tracklist. "This Godless Endeavor" is just through and through a high quality release and it has definite "album of the year" potential. Upon conclusion a 5 star (100%) rating is deserved.