Review Summary: must we die to live?
The universe came into being with an almost unfathomable amount of density. In an infinitesimally small fraction of a second, it would begin to expand and cool in a process that continues to this very day.
All Our Tomorrows End Today exists in the Planck epoch, in that very brief moment of time before the universe grew.
It was 11 minutes, it was a picosecond - the notes are so condensed in time that they cannot even be separated as individual particles. The four fundamental forces of guitar, bass, drum and voice are consolidated into one by the extreme temperatures. The beginning is very much the end for a work that foresees its death during its birth - every breath is a furious gasp, either that of a willful newborn or that of a dying man. During the inhale - a relative silence of static, a fleeting pause before the storm, a thread of melodicism peaking through. And during the exhale - the violent release of every single molecule of air from the lungs, the chest collapsing into the void.
The neck of
All Our Tomorrows End Today is strained forward, witnessing demise in its myriad of forms. It’s as inconsequential as wilting flowers on “Our Adventures Incomplete”, but the same song also speaks of writing names in the sand for someone who is presumably dead. Isn’t that so painfully futile as a form of memorialization? But that might be the point.
Ampere are creators, but they know they are not gods.
All Our Tomorrows End Today, born from the ashes of Orchid, should also thank the gods that it was not created by them. Only beings pursued by loss could possibly comprehend suffering so intimately - a capering forest god, however eloquent of a poet, would have made something rather maudlin were it told to tackle the topics of imminent doom and despair. And however melodramatic such themes seem in themselves, someone’s got to talk about them eventually. Ampere suppress bitter laughter as they confess their self-awareness: “in this song, we'll interrupt ourselves & never come to an end.”
They're proud, though, they really are. “Against Automaton” is a rallying cry for their chaos, a knowing look at an audience with “young hearts [that] don’t always beat to standard verse & chorus; we’ll deviate from [their] script & fake our own deaths tonight”. Ampere have equivocated their stop-start hardcore onslaught with utter genuineness, and who’s to deny them that? They’re oddly liberated by primitive fears: “we knew there would be no future; that was our greatest freedom.” And
All Our Tomorrows End Today, Ampere might want to say, is just a freshly ripped-out amygdala presented with intelligent discourse. “Choose a point you've made and destroy it, or critique the critiques; destroy the ironclad,” they declare on “The Jailors Speak Of Freedom”, and you can see how this form of encouraging scepticism is more effective than saying “f*ck the system”.
I don’t want to co-opt Ampere’s message for the sake of my own rambling. I may have initially based things on a cosmic scale, but
All Our Tomorrows End Today actively pits its zoomed-in snapshots against the scope of the universe’s workings. A drop in the ocean is still one drop more. The universe might be scrambling towards its heat death, but something, however briefly, was once here.
