We’re Here To The End is the first full-length live album by the band Therapy?, due to be released on eight of November 2010. The album was recorded over three nights at the end of March this year at Monto Water Rats, London, and mixed in May 2010 at Blast Studios, Newcastle.

We’re Here to the End album cover.

The album is a two CD release featuring thirty-five tracks, culled from all three nights of the London residency, but thankfully it doesn’t show any cracks from being a pieced together show.

It’s difficult for me to review this – quite simply it’s almost a greatest hits and more live. I spent my teenage years in Dublin in the nineties when it seemed that Therapy? played a different bar every week and had a new EP every other month. I wore the quintessential nineties undercut with a large question mark shaved into the back of my head. I kept this up for about a year but first did it for the “Nurse” album launch in the long forgotten “Rock Garden”. My point is – I’m a little biased and it’s difficult for me to separate my own history from that of the band.

Therapy are a band who have done their own thing and ignored trends since the early days of “Baby Teeth” and “Pleasure Death”, right up until the recent return to form found on last year’s excellent “Crooked Timber”; a band who, despite falling in and out of favour with the music press, have always had a good-sized following – owing in part to consistent and frequent live tours. You may not always hear all the songs you want but you know, regardless the band would play with passion, and passion is difficult to capture.

When Heavy Metal became “ironic” at the end of the nineties and birth of the 21st century, Therapy? did the unthinkable and embraced the genre. Not surprising to some but in part I think it was inevitable, as these were the fans that kept coming to shows and throwing up the devil horns. Metal is to many the ultimate in “outsider” music and lyrically and often sonically, this is what Therapy? have always been about.

But what of the live release itself? Well, in many ways it’s a mixed bag – but a good mixed bag, kind of like Dolly Mixtures. Thirty-five songs over two CDs – I’m sure everybody will have a favourite. “Diane” gets a ramped up rock treatment and sounds better for it. “Isolation” contains a sing along verse from “Loose”, which equally adds to the track. My main issue is simply, as with some gigs, the bass and bass drum are often difficult to tell apart. Sure, it gives a dirty live feel, but I do think in some parts it lets the recording down. This may just be a personal prejudice as I still miss the unique element added by former drummer Fyfe Ewing. His individual style has never been recreated.

On the whole, this is a close to the real thing as you’ll get without jumping up and down vigorously and drenching yourself in sweat first. The album is full of personal favourites, such as “Opel Mantra” and “Knives”, as well as the true gem “Evil Elvis”, but for me the newer tracks – especially “Crooked Timber” – really stand out as examples of what this band is truly capable of live, and when they play its hard not to feel part of the whole live experience. Some have argued that the band may have been better served by recording one of the current “Troublegum” tour dates, but personally think that the shows here better represent the ever-changing but always interesting sounds of a band who never seemed to be understood outside of Europe.

A great representation of a truly great band, twenty years of ear aching loud and sometimes strange and dark music.

8.5/10