Since his days as lead singer of Black Flag, Henry Rollins has been the premier angry young man of the American underground. The Flag folded in the mid-Eighties, but Rollins seems to be with us to stay. Aside from fronting the Rollins Band full time, he's published voluminous amounts of poetry, done spoken-word tours and become a regular on the lecture circuit. He's even got a spinoff group, the hip-hop-flavored Wartime, a collaboration with Rollins Band bassist Andrew Weiss. You could say the cat stays busy.

The End of Silence offers more than seventy minutes of blistering rage-core. Stylistically about midway between the MC5 and Black Sabbath, it is a punishing, unrelenting piece of work, unleavened by humor. Like the Rollins Band's prior records, it functions as a modern day equivalent of John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band: a (sort of) concept album by which the posthardcore generation can measure its pain. While Rollins is one of the best hardcore-derived singers around – few can match his clarity and power – his psychoneurotic ranting is ultimately grating. Misanthropy, betrayal, anomie, alienation, self-loathing, dysfunctional relationships – you name it, Rollins will howl about it, ad nauseam. When he sings, "When you see yourself and see the one that you hate," on "What Do You Do," it's painfully obvious that he hasn't progressed far beyond the decade-old bloody-fist-and-mirror photograph of himself that adorned the cover of Black Flag's Damaged.

Of course, extreme music always tends to focus on an artist's chief obsessions: Slayer's got its Satanism, Mötley Crüe its decadence. Rollins has a bellyful of bile and an urge to express the torment in his head. "Life will not break your heart/It will crush it!" he declaims on the twelve-minute "Blues Jam." Rollins's dissatisfaction, at this point, must qualify as terminal. Caveat emptor. (RS 626)

TOM SINCLAIR