Eternal Helcaraxe is one of the few Metal bands to hail from Ireland, where really the only truly well-known Metal export is Primordial. Eternal Helcaraxe is a three-piece band that claims to be Black Metal, though I would protest at this pigeonholing. To Whatever End is made up of quite a lot of different and sometimes disparate elements of Metal, and to me defies sub-genre hair-splitting. Even umbrella terms such as Pagan Metal or Folk Metal don't quite fit here.

This genre-bending is one of the things I like most about To Whatever End. The songs are quite different from one another; each having it's own character and style. Opener ...And As Kings We'll Fall is a lush keyboard-driven intro that is sad, uplifting, and epic, and actually quite reminds me of something one of my favorite non-metal bands, VNV Nation, might do. Title track To Whatever End comes out of the gate with a percussive drum attack, some interesting bass-work, and oddly melodeath-sounding riffs ala Amon Amarth before breaking into the almost narrative-like raspy vocals. It isn't until after a melodic break that you really start hearing some tremolo-picked Black Metal-esque passages, which soon escalate into the climax of the track: an epic keyboard-backed sorrowful and beautiful finish.

So the band mixes in some Black Metal to a Gothenburg sound, you say. Big deal. Well, it keeps changing. Kin, Comrades & Country has an entirely different riffing style, more along the lines of While Heaven Wept's recent material. Strike has some truly vicious Black Metal riffs that blurrily speed through the six minute run time, letting go of the intensity only for the chorus and breaks. Closing number All The Battles To Come is an excellent and fitting end to this demo, being part epic Viking Metal and part speedy Melodic Black Metal.

The fantastic production for a demo, the variety in style and pacing, and the all around tidy songwriting make To Whatever End a must hear for fans of in-between bands of the Folk/Pagan/Black/Death/Heavy Metal variety. Pretty much everything from the guitar riffs to the bass-work to the drum fills to the vocals both harsh and clean are up to standard for nowadays, and really the only put-off I could see is if you truly hate Gothenburg Melodeath and anything that sounds remotely similar to it.