ALBUM REVIEW: Something To Remember Me By – To Kill Achilles

TO KILL ACHILLES have always been a band that feel honest in their music. Their previous releases, full-length album Existence and the Anywhere But Here EP, have gone from strength to strength in their musicality and bold presence. The band’s latest release Something To Remember Me By is by far the most brutally honest record the Dundee five piece have produced thus far. Tackling the most difficult of topics, the album revolves around suicide, in an honest and open look at the trials of an individual mind.

The record is structured as the final year of our nameless character before they ultimately take their own life. Each song becomes a month of that year in it’s own right, but more than that, Something To Remember Me By is a harrowing note back to the audience about all the hardships and issues of someone in this headspace. It’s brutally honest listening, and songs like Oh God, I’ve Never Felt This Low have a power in the music, the bittersweet melodies and the raw vocals that tell of heartfelt despair and isolation. From a musical sense, this album smacks and punches something silly, there’s technically bright and the melodic movements keep things interesting, while minor post-rock elements work to create a sense of ambience and apathy, of loss and deep sorrow buried under the chaos and rage of the thundering music. There’s riff galore, and breakdowns that feel as menacing as you could ask for.

If you’re looking for the darker, more spite filled and hateful songs, fourpercent, Beautiful Mourning and There’s No Right Way To Say This… are great examples of songs that musically embody that kind of self-destructive, lost and restless aggression. Full of blurred agitation, the relentless torrent of sound that bashes and screams through each song pulls you further into the characters despair and sense of remoteness.

Venom, 21:36 and Luna et Altum feel especially frenetic and lost, the breakdowns angry and feral, with a the heart of each song alluding to a small piece of who this person is falling away, that they feel a shell of themselves; trapped in their own head; their isolated body and even trapped by the way society works to keep us apart.

We Only Exist When We Exist Together and title track Something To Remember Me By are more spoken word poems and musings than pure music: A stark desperation, a plea and despairing urge to the listener to connect, to feel other people’s lives and push away from the idea that we are just alone. They are moments of solace in a turbulent record, to really stop and think what we can be when we look to one another. This whole record, for all its pain and agony, is more a demonstration to what can be prevented that anything else.

While there are a few tropes that Something To Remember Me By follows here and there, the music is as fresh and compelling in sound as it is in it’s message. It’s a triumph that an album can make you not only reflective, but truly empathetic to its themes, and more so to the band themselves. This record pulls from every member’s own experiences, and in understanding that this is a shared journey for them, so too can you as a listener feel connected to their words and music. If you have felt the way that TO KILL ACHILLES do on Something To Remember Me By, then you are not alone, and by nothing else but that fact, then you should not give up and life is worth living.

Rating: 9/10

Something To Remember Me By is set for release on on February 5th via Arising Empire.

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