Released: October 7, 1997
Considering the musical landscape during the mid-’90s, few bands sounded more out of place than Big Wreck. With teeny-bopper pop and nu-metal duking it out for mainstream supremacy, the by-way-of-Berklee four-piece cut their own path thanks in no small part to frontman Ian Thornley’s soaring vocals and impressive fretwork. Of course, it always comes down to the songs. And ‘amazing songs’ is precisely why Big Wreck’s debut, In Loving Memory Of…, resonated so deeply with fans like myself.
Like most OG fans, my first exposure to Big Wreck came from Much Music (Canada’s far-superior take on MTV), where the band’s music videos gained steady rotation. I literally couldn’t believe my eyes (and ears). The big riffs, the bigger vocals, the proggy arrangements–it was like the best parts of every band I loved (Soundgarden, Led Zeppelin, Rush, etc.) rolled into one glorious package. That said, In Loving Memory Of… is hardly a pile of disparate influences–Thornley’s genre-blending tendencies were always in service of the song.
For instance, the album-opening (and leadoff single) “The Oaf (My Luck is Wasted)” pairs a slinky guitar riff with one of the album’s most memorable choruses (and a countrified instrumental outro to boot). Meanwhile, the uptempo “That Song” and pensive “Blown Wide Open” showcase Thornley’s earnest, ‘heart on his sleeve’ lyrics and rightfully remain fan favorites to this day. That said, In Loving Memory Of… had way more to offer than what listeners might’ve caught on the airwaves.
Prog-tinged riff-fests like “Look What I Found,” “How Would You Know,” and “Fall Through Your Cracks” are balanced with moody, mid-tempo gems like “Oh My,” “Under the Lighthouse,” and “Waste.” Meanwhile, the album’s most low-key moment (“By the Way”) sets the table for a brilliant closing salvo. “Between You and I” and “Prayer” deliver a couple of the album’s best riffs with some equally powerful lyrics, while “Overemphasizing” is six-plus minutes of prog-grunge perfection that showcases everything that made (makes?) Big Wreck such a force to be reckoned with (and also features my favorite guitar solo of all time).
Bloated runtimes may have been par for the course back in 1997, but at just over sixty minutes, In Loving Memory Of… is the rare case where every song earns its keep. To that point, this is an impressively cohesive listen, largely thanks to the solid thematic undercurrent unifying this otherwise eclectic batch of tunes. As Thornley famously quipped at the time, “The majority of the album is actually written about one girl. Somebody who’s still fucking me up.”
From a production standpoint, In Loving Memory Of… is far from your typical slick, ultra-produced major label debut. There’s a raw, unpolished quality here that perfectly complements the band’s organic sound. As Thornley told Don Bonomini in 2018, “…demos were recorded so that we could use it to shop around and get a record deal. In the end it was the demos that ended up being the actual record that Atlantic put out.” The fact that these “demo” recordings were deemed strong enough to release as-is says as much about the band’s innate talent as it does the material.
Despite the modest success of In Loving Memory Of…, Big Wreck’s sophomore release (2001’s The Pleasure and the Greed) ultimately failed to meet expectations, and the band soon disbanded. Ian Thornely carried on as a solo artist but eventually reunited with guitarist Brian Doherty and opted to resurrect the Big Wreck banner for 2012’s Albatross. Since that time, Big Wreck 2.0 has delivered an impressively consistent batch of studio albums (despite a rotating cast of band members). For my money, however, 1999’s In Loving Memory Of remains the band’s high water mark and the point from which I continue to measure Thornley’s output–an unsung classic indeed.
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