THE LAST REIGN is a Buffalo, New York band that's released a couple of full length albums and a few EPs over the past decade or so.  Considering a good chunk of that was spent in a varying array of quarantine, and- in the case of a band that suffers the fate of Arctic winds six months of the year- under a few feet of snow, that's a pretty prolific showing.  "Endangered Pieces, Volume One" is a compilation of previously released material, some re-visited tunes and a few experimental pieces in the form of covers and- gulp- chip tunes.  They involved vocalist Jesse Isadore from NARWHAL BLOODBATH (band name of the year, by the way) and DESIGN THE VOID in the creative process, working on one original with him at the helm, and each picking a cover (which I'll discuss later).  It's a gloriously schizophrenic album, while still adhering to the strict rules demanded by Gothenburg-like death metal.  THE LAST REIGN never seems to lose sight of who they are and who they want to be, even if they stray remarkably close to flying off the metal rails of the sonic railroad track.

The choice to throw together a hodgepodge of cover tunes and end the album with a handful of Nintendo NES inspired songs is a perplexing one, particularly when the strongest song by multiple musical miles is the sole original "Sands of Fate". "Sands of Fate" is a fierce homage to Swedish death- a hyper-charged, confidently aggressive foray into violently beaten, over-driven instruments.  It's not anything you haven't heard before a million times, as this is pretty much the rancid bread and butter of modern death metal bands: if it ain't broken, don't you dare fucking fix it.  But then, for some reason unbeknownst to me, the guys in THE LAST REIGN tried to fix it by taking the obvious route: covering an Olivia Rodrigo song.  (That's my attempt at written sarcasm, which only works partially, even less when I can't inject an emoji.  But let me make my point.)

The best covers by metal bands- think KINGWOMAN covering the Stone Roses' "I Wanna Be Adored" or INTER ARMA doing "Southern Man" by Neil Young- understand the deconstruction already inherent in the instrumentation of modern metal. It's music made to break down the world to its basic foundation: the deepened bedrock of cement and the towering bars or rebar soon to be immortalized and encased.  It's not the sound of creating something beautiful, although this could be the very thing.  Metal is about finding the beauty in the ugliness: the necessity of being.  Even the most gorgeous being on the planet is just a disgusting mess of blood and tissue and ligaments and bones on the inside, and that's the truth that metal tries to dig at.  In the case of INTER ARMA's "Southern Man" it's a Richmond band watching the monuments to Robert E. Lee become covered in a country's existential angst before being violently dragged to the ground.  "KINGWOMAN's" haunting, dark cover of "I Wanna Be Adored" drags the bodies of the dead along the gravel road to hell, and demands that you keep your heads down.  It's the antithesis of the self-conscious shoegazer. It's the guy in the baggy sweater with the bloody knife in his hand: the deconstruction of what it means to be human.  These are covers seething in a power that their originals didn't always have, and that's what made them so incredible.  That's not say in the hands of the right band, a cover of Olivia Rodrigo can't do that; but is to say that making that choice, is often just as artistically gutsy as learning the fucking song in the first place.

The covers on this album seem to do away with all that philosophical nonsense- and nonsense, I'm sure it is- in hopes that they might elicit some hi-fives from a couple of bros as they play Call of Duty.  "Dude! This is totally that Olivia Rodrigo song! How rad!" one of them would say, as the other tries to think who Olivia Rodrigo actually is.  If the goal is to have fun, then I suppose they are having fun.  If the goal is to create something artistically worthy of putting on an album, it falls a little short.  And if the goal is to create something to which one could groove, I have to wonder why not write a song like this to follow up "Sands of Fate" instead of moving on to "Separate Ways" or a WHAM song or a HUEY LEWIS tune.  In other words, I don't think they work.  Maybe live, throwing in one or two of these would be a cool thing to hear- a familiar voice to grab on to- but in the concept of a compilation album, it just becomes too much.

And then there's the Nintendo 8-Bit (16-Bit? I don't know?  I don't really care, to be honest.) stuff.  Perhaps there's an audience for this kind of music, but I generally assumed it was for someone my son's age, who is 9.  But that's not whom THE LAST REIGN is shooting for.  Then who is "Endangered Pieces, Volume One" for?  The  20-something incel living in the basement of his mother's house?  Even that seems way too on the nose for something as ridiculously diverse as this record.  In the end, THE LAST REIGN is writing music for the same reason any of us create art: it's what they do and it's what they want to do.  Whether I like it or not is unimportant.  What is important is that you can get what you want out of it, and if that's a couple of fist bumps and some subtle smiles of approval as the band goes from a whisper to a scream, then that's probably enough!