It is always a pleasure to hear of a new release on Dutch label, Construction Records, and on 22nd March, we get the third album from For All We Know, the project of Ruud Jolie, guitarist of the great Dutch metal outfit, Within Temptation. The album is entitled By Design Or By Disaster, and you can get it by taking yourselves along to Home - Construction records

Jolie’s lyrical collaborator is singer Wudstik, and the band consists of the same musicians who were featured on the first two albums, namely Léo Margarit (Pain of Salvation), Kristoffer Gildenlöw (ex-Pain of Salvation, and whose exceptional new album, Empty, was itself reviewed on this website very recently), and Marco Kuypers (ex-Cloud Machine).

This album is my introduction to Jolie’s solo work, but on the evidence of this, it won’t be long before I explore some more. The album cover portrays very nicely the overarching theme of this album, namely the story of a young man making his way through life, building, and losing relationships, such as with his parents, lovers and later his children. The artwork shows three characters representing the same person at different stages of life.

So, we have eleven tracks here, and two of them are available to view and listen to, and are, as ever, embedded here for your enjoyment.

We open with Forced to be Free, and from the opening bars, it is instantly accessible, some nice grooves on the guitars and bright keys. The lyrics talk to me of the initial sponge of a young person’s brain, before it is “forced” to be “free” by the world around us. As the track progresses, we get some lovely bass licks from Gildenlöw, and he and Margarit make for a strong rhythm section, whilst the guitar solo is strong and Wudstik’s voice leads some pleasing harmonies. All in all, a strong start.

Lifeline is one of the tracks made available and is a track about the young man’s difficult relationship with his father, something I think that many of us listening can relate to, a universal truth of men throughout the ages, and the fear that we will end up exactly like him as we get older with a family of our own. A great drum pattern to begin, when the main piece gets going, it does so with some crackling riffs. There are some more very good vocal harmonies, and this is a very thoughtful piece of music, the keys especially adding a sense of the dramatic, and as the song progresses, the vocals especially portray the fear inherent in this experience. I think this is one of the best portrayals musically of family conflict I have heard, because of the fact that it is not explicitly violent itself, vocally or musically. Its thoughtfulness and intelligence put the message across far better. The video is very good as well.

This Hell We Know follows and is immediately brooding, tense, staring into the void, paranoid. This is a cracker of a heavy rock track, with some great piano work by Kuypers in a particularly sensitive section replacing the riffs which is expanded upon by some achingly lovely vocals underpinned by a complex drum riff and chugging bass which foretell the inevitable explosion of noise, anger, and rage. The quiet intensity then reasserts itself, and the final minute has some interesting noises and effects.

The Future That Came Too Soon was the first single released, and the official video is embedded below. There’s a great blast of Hammond organ coming into my ears as I write this. There is a good mix of pace, at once heavy with some thundering riffs, and then far more laid back, almost pastoral in fact in a piece I read as dealing with relationship matters and how everything can seem vastly different in the welcoming light of morning than the harsh black of the night. I might add here that this track in particular confirmed Wudstik as one of my vocal finds of recent times, a great performance by him, and the closing section is quietly intense.

All We Did Was Hide has a lovely acoustic guitar and gentle vocal to begin, and as the track develops, there is such a deep sense of melancholy to it, a retrospective song with the urge to move on and, I feel, forget about the self. It is simply beautiful, and the emotion builds as it moves forward, with the guitar solo leading the collective into a wall of sound before the close returns to the start. Thus far, the rock ballad of the year for me.

Hush is a short track a little over two minutes long. A gentle guitar, a plaintive voice, a wonderful rhythm section in a piece which builds the noise as it progresses and is simply desperately sad and proving that this act can speak to the listener without words, always the mark of class. Another one of those tracks we often say on this website that a reasonable criticism is it is too short owing to its excellence and interesting ideas.

Remind Me To Forget You is another title which I am sure all of you reading this will have uttered, be it to a former lover, parent, sibling, friend who has let you down. It has a loud and brash opening segment before the words enter to settle us down, to face reality, and there is a guitar solo full of feeling, before the track explodes again in what I can only really describe as a sort of bubble-gum metal – sounds weird, I know, but it is the best descriptor I have, and it is interspersed with some more traditional classic rock. As the track moves towards its final passage, Kuypers again produces a very good piano lead before the brashness returns in a track not quite as convincing to these ears as those which preceded it.

Flaws weighs in at just short of the eight-minute mark and it begins in that introspective mood this album does so well. There are some heavy riffs in this, but it is at its heart another very reflective piece lyrically with the music reflecting these changing moods of life and thought very well. Some of the bass guitar work is extremely good, and the music itself veers between the lighter end of the rock spectrum to the metallic one, all the while with a clear commercial sensibility. As we approach the closing segment, Jolie treats us to a lovely guitar solo, and the pastoral sense brought out at the end is supreme and moving.

Guide Me In Getting Lost contains some more utterly gorgeous vocals. The track veers between the heavy and the dystopian, via the symphonic, and I get the sense of a man fearful of losing his mind and sense of self, and this expands very well halfway through, with a great guitar burst. Throughout, the listener is filled with noise, and a very good one at that.

Ghosts of Summer’s Past is the penultimate track. Some of the guitar work on this is stunning, very haunting in a track which talks of breaking free from the past but needing help in making those important steps forward. As we move to the final two minutes, there is a brilliant change of tempo, with exceptional bass work leading us into a short, but pretty piano, before the main theme reasserts itself, all the while the track building and building in your mind as the protagonist proclaims himself free at the end.

We close with, appropriately enough, Goodbye. It is very thoughtful again, with a lovely piano lead accompanied by a throbbing bass and some interesting keys. This track reminds me very much of some of Sylvan’s more dramatic moments. The guitar solo is full of emotion and the production values on this hit the money shot with a glorious hit of noise before the close brings us back to a denouement which strikes me as a paeon to a voluntary end to existence.

By Design Or By Disaster is a very good album, and one I recommend very strongly to you. What I like about it is how deftly it avoids cliches and grabs the attention, with changing moods and some extraordinarily good passages where the human condition is wrought in all its fragility. An intelligent rock album, with something to please all from the outright metal fiend to the pastoral progressive rock thinker.