Memoriam is back to write history.
Created on smoking ashes of Bolt Thrower, Karl Willetts (vocals, ex-Bolt Thrower) gathers Frank Healy (bass, Sacrilege, ex-Benediction, ex-Napalm Death), Scott Fairfax (guitar, Massacre, live for Benediction) and Andrew Whale (drums, Darkened, ex-Bolt Thrower) to pay tribute to Martin « Kiddie » Kearns, late Bolt Thrower drummer. After three albums, Andrew Whale lets his place to Spikey T. Smoth (drums, Sacrilege) for To The End, the band’s new chapter.
If at the beginning Memoriam played an Old School Death Metal drawn from what Bolt Thrower offered, the sound evolved with albums. If about the artwork, we have master Dan Seagrave since the very beginning, we also feel his art gets darker. To The End seems to be the beginning of a new era, marked by some quite impressive sound changes. Death Metal is obviously still the band’s basis, but we feel it becoming more massive, warlike and modern. Karl Willets’ vocals are still as impressive and marked by this very special voice, but musicians give a new path to those aggressive riffs.
We immediately feel this changing since Onwards Into Battle, the first song, that instantly throws us in the heart of the battle, after communicating us some indications by sample. The seizing groove offers solid and sometimes very fast strikes to accompany this apocalyptic ambience, like on This War is Won. The mix allow to offer a new youth to Old School tones, but also to create a flood of sharp riffs at the same time, while the rhythm part bursts into fire. The break calls epic and dark leads, just like the melancholic introduction of No Effect. The band strikes with a thick and catchy rhythmic to walk with this warlike discourse, then piercing leads come. Failure to Comply begins with a sample giving informations of what comes next. Without surprise, the sound explodes on our face as a bomb in the trenches, and the output is bloody! The band never gets short of ideas to melt Old School patterns and more modern sonorities, we can feel it into those violent and epic riffs.
Each Step (One Closer to the Grave) offers us a dark melancholy and a worrying languor. The previous battle ended, and the devastated battlefield full of war’s horrors stands in front of us, while the vocalist helps us into this desolation. On the end of the road, the sound becomes more aggressive, driving us to To The End, our new fight. Once again, dark and seizing tones are present, but we feel that some rage still lives in the band and its sharp riffs. Vacant Stare offers a solid foundation, based on pure violence coupled to a communicative energy. Some virulent outbursts take part to the composition, offering a real hymn to headbanging, then the final part makes us sink into melancholy thanks to heady leads. Madness comes for Mass Psychosis and its rhythmic that only asks to be unleashed on the world, offering a hooking basis on which the band puts heavy and dissonant sound, that will be cut by a far break. Rhythmic surfaces and explodes again before As My Heart Grow Cold, which is probably Memoriam’s most surprising song. A melancholy and an ice-cold languor, coupled to majestic, airy and quiet sonorities. It is not only Death Metal, it is not a song like the others, it is a final requiem that definitively confirms my first impression on this album.
Memoriam knows how to do a very unique Death Metal, it’s a fact. With To The End, the band decided to move forward and offer not only incredibly hooking and heavy compositions, but also sonorities we did not expect, driving this album from “very good” to “unmistakable”.
95/100