Before I listened “All the New Ends”, I took another audial gander at Amusement Parks on Fire’s back catalog. Their early releases are a perfect conglomerate of nineties rock tempos, early 2000s post-emocore anthems, and a tincture of shoegaze. Their sound, as previously described in other reviews, is “otherworldly.” This ominous presence of the unknown in APF’s music is a consistent essence that founding member Michael Feerick has managed to take total ownership of.
The opening track, “The New Ends”, is a nostalgic, rocksteady waltz that travels through APF’s evolution. Feerick’s vocals lull a melody that sounds carefree—playful even—but rings though it comes from a heartfelt place that seems intimate. It is as though he was caught singing to a couple of friends, or on his own. This is where the ownership of his sound comes through. It is youthful, genuine, and familiar.
“The New Ends”does at the end what AFP does best: pushes the listener off a cliff into the unknown, with a cosmic, heavenly sound scape that is the next track, “. The track opens with a hymn of guitars, blaring bass that sounds like the exhaust of a rocket ship, and majestic cymbals. It is the perfect interlude that makes one forget what planet they’er on.
The EP wraps up with the back-to-basics track, “Internal Flame”. This track rests heavily on a fine-calibrated wall of sound. It brings the EP together the way you would expect to be brought back down to Earth from the track before. It is almost a thirteen minute opus that starts off as a structured song, and unfurls into this epic rock-out. The entire EP is less than a half-hour long, and every time I played it, it felt like the perfect sonic escape for the prefect amount of time. -D.