Bolt Thrower and Memoriam

Bolt Thrower were a special band for me, first band I saw live in a club as oppossed to a seated theatre (on the Grindcrusher tour no less with Carcass, Morbid Angel and Napalm Death) and I wrote off an interview to them for the first issue of ENZK and was surprised to get a reply (and ended up corresponding with Karl for a number of years and seeing them numerous times in the Edinburgh Venue and up in Aberdeen) so it was with a heavy heart, but not unsurprising all things considered, that I read the band's statement declaring their tour of duty to be over.
A bit sad that I won't get to see them live again and experience the aural equivalent of "being run over by a tank for an hour" as Gav Kidd described it when I took him to see Bolt Thrower in Glasgow in 2006.

So here is a bunch of photos I've taken of them set to a live version of All That Remains, thanks for the memories:

So what does remain?
Not much word on what Gav, Jo and Baz are doing but Karl has teamed up with his old BT team mate Andy Whale along with Frank Healy and Scott Fairfax (who have been in Benediction, Sacrilege, Cerebral Fix, Napalm Death...) to form Memoriam and got it together pretty quick in releasing a 7" The Hellfire Demos containing two songs; War Rages On and Resistance (a third song from the demo session, Surrounded By Death, has been released on a flexi with Decibel magazine in the states.
It's pretty much in the same vein as BT but the sound isn't as dense and steamrolling, feeling like there's a bit of breathing space in the guitar work instead of the wall of crushing death that BT employed so devestatingly.
Memoriam are by no way lightweight though, the riffs are slab heavy with creeping scales thrown in and Karl's vocals are still that mixture of growled out but audible style. Lyrics and song titles seem to deal with war as per previous Willets' work and I expect they work on dual levels as ever.
The 7" came out on Purple, Clear and Black vinyl, pretty much sold out except for a few copies on black so hit up Cosmic Key Creations if you want to get your hands on one before it's too late.
As you can see here the purple version was customised to match my ironing board cover...

The decibel flexi is pretty pricey if you're not in the US due to the crappy postage rates from the US but if you live over there you should snap it up as it's like $6. Follow this link to stream the song and order a copy:
Memoriam Decibel Magazine

Memoriam are currently in the studio recording an album so looking forward to that dropping in a few months and they are also going to play the Lord Of The Land in Scotland on 1st April which is headlined by Autopsy (who I saw last time they played here, 27 years ago!) and Acid Reign are playing too (who I also saw many times feckin years ago and also last September and they were still ace) so I'm fucking chuffed for that indeed, although it falls on the wife's birthday, oh bugger...