THE END PRESS:
WHY DO YOU MOURN:
Layers and cycles continue to unveil for The End. Injecting a drone element to “Doomfunk Mcs” they open up an ambient dimension. It all comes crashing down with the brilliance of the closing track “Black Vivaldi Sonata.” This is where The End truly transform, finding a no-wave space in between styles. Suddenly, the grip and control are surrendered, and the volatile essence gives way to a strangely romantic setting. As the track progresses it begins to resemble some otherworldly gospel track, once more Jernberg flexing the boundlessness of her voice. It is a stunning metamorphosis, revealing an act that does not wish to be confined. Sure, the free jazz and avant-garde notions are in their blood, but they still do not let these aspects mindlessly guide them. And this is the sign of a great creative act.
Spyros Stasis
https://www.scenepointblank.com/reviews/end/why-do-you-mourn/
…The sounds resemble the music genre favored by Don Cherry during his years in Sweden. It is world music, but one that claims no specific country of origin, nor for that matter, genre. The End fluctuates between folk, free jazz, hardcore, poetry and jazz rock.
Mark Corroto
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/why-do-you-mourn-the-end-self-produced
It’s interesting to see how an alpha dog like Mats Gustafsson fits into a band context and realizes that everything has to revolve around Sofia Jernberg’s voice – her timbre, her timing, her sound and her technical diversity. Because that’s where the emotional depth of the music comes from.
Nowhere can you hear it better than on The End’s cover version of Rigmor Gustafsson’s “Winter Doesn’t End“, in the original an oily, germ-free jazz ballad, in which music and the somber content of the lyrics have almost nothing to do with each other. Jernberg radically reinterprets the song; she brings out the ominous nature of the text, the emotional despair. The arrangement is barren like the landscape in the song, the pitch shrill, the flute atonal. All beauty and warmth have left the world, leaving behind mere emptiness in men. That which is commonly associated with Scandinavian jazz, the floating ECM sound that has degenerated into a cliché (there are great ECM albums, don’t get me wrong), to which one likes to drink an expensive Chablis in posh jazz clubs, is radically thrown overboard here.
However, if you think this is the highlight of the album, you’re wrong. That’s “Whose Face“, a track that – with its theme, its force and its power – is most reminiscent of The Thing and Fire! but which quickly evolves into a folk-rock monster. “Inside my head / a common room / a common place / a common tune,“ Jernberg sings – repeating it again and again. This is music as necromancy, a psychedelic nightmare in which Gustafsson does what most of his fans love him for: blasting out merciless, brutal saxophone riffs and galloping away recklessly until the reins are stretched to breaking point.
The album? A killer. But what else did you expect.
Martin Shray
https://www.freejazzblog.org/2023/06/the-end-why-do-you-mourn-trost-records.html