By: Daniel Jackson
Album Type:
Full Length
Date Released:
18/05/2018
Label:
Century Media Records
The omnipresent
malevolence that coats the majority of the album gives it a different feel from
the rest of the band’s catalog. At The Gates do their
best to get the best of both worlds: acting as an agent of fan service and
staying in their own lane, while also using broad strokes to give the old sound
a new context.
‘To Drink From the Night Itself’ CD//DD//LP track listing:
1. Der Widerstand
2. To Drink from the Night Itself
3. A Stare Bound in Stone
4. Palace of Lepers
5. Daggers of Black Haze
6. The Chasm
7. In Nameless Sleep
8. The Colours of the Beast
9. A Labyrinth of Tombs
10. Seas of Starvation
11. In Death They Shall Burn
12. The Mirror Black
The Review:
At The Gates,
being in the At The Gates nostalgia business, have
returned to be really good at being a version of At The Gates
that you’d like to hear, as a fan of At The Gates. I know
how that read just now, and I don’t care: it’s fucking accurate. They’re a band
intent on crafting the best nostalgia album they can, and they’ve done a
exceptional job of meeting those goals here. They’ve taken the moody atmosphere
of ‘With Fear I Kiss The Burning
Darkness’, gussied it up with a modern studio production, a touch of added darkness,
and plugged it into the “Slaughter of The
Soul 5000”, their patented nostalgia refinement machine.
The end result is ‘To Drink From The Night Itself’: the
album morose death metal folks of a certain age are sure to enjoy enough to
spend money on. And bless them for it too! The last thing we need is Jonas
Björler getting some wild “got to keep up with the times” hair up his ass, like
his other band The Haunted did, and you might remember how
long it took them to right that ship once they set sail upon that sea.
The formula for this album is pretty
straightforward: you’ve got your slower, melodic parts that range from mournful
twin harmonies to murky atmospheric darkness. And then you’ve got your uptempo Slayer beat stuff, which I affectionately referred to as
the “Slaughter of the Soul 5000”
machine earlier. That’s the stuff meant to get your “Blinded By Fear” glands salivating, like Pavlov’s dog whenever
Pavlov entered the room. It’s all very comfortable, like a warm sweater and a
cup of hot cocoa at the start of winter.
Here’s the fucked up thing: At The Gates nostalgia baiting us for forty-five minutes
still makes for one of the finer death metal albums of the year, and they sound
like they’re barely trying. The band are an inexorable monolith of “remember
the good old days” emotions here, and all we can do is continue to be
fascinated and entranced by it. We’re powerless to resist the charm of
familiarity, and really why would we want to? There’s no harm in it.
While that “warm sweater of fond
melodeath remembrance” I mentioned earlier is certainly a huge part of why ‘To Drink From The Night Itself’ works
so well, it would be unfair to say that the album doesn’t have its own
character. They’re especially fond of using those deep, resonant chords for
building atmosphere on this album, which gives the album a more menacing
feeling altogether. In fact, you could call this At The Gates’ darkest
album to date, and have a solid case for that belief. ‘With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness’ was more gloomy than
outright ominous, and this album is firmly planted on that second word’s side
of things.
For all of my needling the album for
playing it safe, ‘To Drink From The Night
Itself’ is a big improvement over ‘At
War With Reality’. The parts of the album meant to give you a cozy trip
down memory lane do so remarkably. The omnipresent malevolence that coats the
majority of the album gives it a different feel from the rest of the band’s
catalog. At The Gates do their best to get the best
of both worlds: acting as an agent of fan service and staying in their own
lane, while also using broad strokes to give the old sound a new context. This
album is the musical equivalent of reuniting with old friends at your favorite
old hangout spot and having a great time, even if the place doesn’t look quite
like it did before. An occasion like that is virtually guaranteed to be a joy
for you because it was the safest choice to bring you that joy in the first
place. Does that really diminish the experience any for you? It didn’t for me.
Band info: Facebook
