Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The heavy hit of the late-night text message that doesn’t intend to harm, but yet without an answer, can cause stress to the intended recipient, all the thoughts of possible wrongs filter through their mind at a stream of knots that does the heart and soul no good. The agony of the doomed weight is only relieved when the conversation void is resumed The Day After, that the shift in the pattern of one thought exchange that we exhibit in this modern era is dangerous, an unrelenting enemy, and one that takes great courage to raise the red flag of vulnerability and beauty up the flag pole of precious engagement in warning.
Finland’s Return To Void second release, and its first in the Pitch Black Records roster, Memory Shift: The Day After is an answer to the Progressive call of fortune to the Hard Rock and Heavy Metal pulse that always enquires with hopeful heart that the song will be more than the just series of notes, it will be a story, another chapter in which the rich tapestry of legends, chronicles and the searing narrative will be majestic.
This second album is the steady refinement, the continued glow in the dark that makes the receiving of the late-night message, not one of fear and worry, but of eager anticipation, of taking the rumour of perception out for a long walk into the woods and leave it bound, gagged, and found The Day After ready to apologise for the wrongs caused.
For Makku Pihlaja, Kalle Kukkonen, Pasi Hakuli, Saku Hakuli and Antti Huopainen, the songs that resist the sense of the late night anger and allow the arms of Progressive Metal and Rock to be heard in the daylight hours, are keen, cultivated and charmingly typical of the Scandinavian way of producing epically charged music.
In songs such as Man of the Sword, Midlands, Ionosphere of the Dark, Passenger and Between Horizons, the style and fortitude of the delivery is to be celebrated, it is to be erase what might have been before and give compassion to that late message; then destroy it for all that it is worth, for The Day After, the future is all that matters now.
Return To Void release Memory Shift: The Day After on August 10th.
Ian D. Hall