Official repress of this classic from 1984!After "Mad Punx And English Dogs" and "Invasion Of The Porky Men" the third vinyl release and second EP of the English Dogs is much more metallic.The typical British punk sound is supported by purposefully applied guitar solos and whipped forward by a somewhat overdriven, reverberating vocals, by the massive drum fire from the ambush these 4 songs form a unit that rolls you down.The English Dogs have, to my mind, created a very individual, new sound with this EP,which is even more raw than that of some of their peers.This is dirty metallic HC punk!Our take: I’ve known about English Dogs for a long time, but I haven’t spent much time with their music. The only English Dogs record I owned previous to this reissue was their third album, 1986’s Where Legend Began, and the thing I remember most about that record is that it sounds a lot like Metallica. I think it might be time for a deeper dive, though, because I’ve been obsessed with To the Ends of the Earth since this reissue came into the store. It still sounds kind of like Metallica to me, but I have more of a soft spot for this style of punky thrash / thrashy punk than I did a few years ago, having gotten obsessed with Sacrilege’s second album, Within the Prophecy, which has a similar vibe. Beyond having cool style, though, the songwriting on To the Ends of the Earth is just perfect. The band builds their songs around chunky riffs with lots of palm muting, but what really makes the songs take off is how they come together and build from part to part. This sturdy foundation allows the lead guitarist to go on all the long, crazy lead runs, weaving in and out of the riffs and peppering the tracks with memorable leads that remind me of Randy Uchida’s in that there are a lot of hammer-ons and pull-offs, but with a strong sense of structure and melody. With only four tracks there isn’t room on To the Ends of the Earth for anything but excitement, and it builds to a brilliant crescendo with the final track, “Survival of the Fittest,” whose anthemic chorus always gets me yelling along. Having grown up in the era when the scene frowned upon punk bands “going metal,” I glossed over a lot of records in this vein, but like the aforementioned Sacrilege LP, Broken Bones’ Bonecrusher, or the Exploited’s Death Before Dishonour, To the Ends of the Earth is a masterpiece of metal-punk fusion.
