At the Gates - To Drink from the Night Itself

Following their unexpected comeback album in 2014, At War with Reality, At the Gates seek to continue the delayed second act of their career with the kind of authority that made them major playmakers of the style of melodic death metal borne from their hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden. As far as comeback albums go for any band, At War with Reality was the solid return to the limelight any band would hope to make after being missing in action for so long, especially after a gap as huge as the nearly two decades between it and Slaughter of the Soul. And To Drink from the Night Itself is a confident continuation of that triumphant resurrection, boasting similarly fiery riffs and almost-operatic solos. Four years after its predecessor, To Drink from the Night Itself shows itself to be a meticulously crafted expansion upon its predecessor’s sound and not simply a lazy capitalization upon the resurgence in popularity it granted them.

The title track bursts through the acoustic-laden intro track’s gates with the signature furious melodeath riffing style they reclaimed in 2014, and the band don’t halt until their barrage until the final whistle at the end of the track listing. Indeed, that is perhaps the only thing that holds this album back: the unchanging melodic death metal firestorm that pours from start to finish. Though, if that’s the album’s only palpable weakness, it certainly speaks well for what At the Gates have presented here.

The second full-bodied song, “A Stare Bound in Stone”, integrates both low-tuned riffing and quick pull-offs in clinical fashion, eventually culminating upon the tremolo-picked outro that carries it into “Palace of Lepers”, a similarly pull-off-filled piece with one of the album’s more emotive tremolo-picked exits.

“Daggers of Black Haze” introduces a bit of black metal energy through its dissonant riffing, but the harmonies that follow synch the apocalyptic riffs together with eerily consonant cadence. “The Chasm” is a more traditional and thrashy At the Gates piece. Yet despite being quick and to the point, the song manages to incorporate much of the same energy the previous tracks did, yet still a bit diluted.

“In Nameless Sleep” follows suit in a relatively less remarkable fashion, still rife with pristine and precise guitar work and sharp percussive rhythms, just not as compositionally thrilling as the majority of the songs here. “The Colours of the Beast”, which follows, is a masterful midtempo apocalyptic headbanger, working together tremolo-picked riffs and palm-muted grooves into one of the album’s more compositionally interesting pieces. “A Labyrinth of Tombs” is similarly dynamic and slightly more speedy than the track it follows, taking on a few thrash metal songwriting techniques to finish rather eloquently.

“Seas of Starvation” brings what feels like a little bit of an Amon Amarth fire the the furnace, sounding like it would fit in the canon of either band. Though not all that dramatic of a departure, it is a nice change of pace at it’s point on the track list. The deathly thrashy “In Death They Shall Burn” channels the early Gothenburg style through exquisitely potent modern production to highlight it’s strengths in newly flattering light. “The Mirror Black” opts to close the album out with slightly post-metal-influenced guitar work, though no less distinctly true to the band’s melodic death metal sound. Its orchestral exit sandwiches the rest of the quite meaty album rather well.

Though certainly a solid release following their first in nearly twenty years, To Drink from the Night Itself is still impeded by a homogeneity that stems not simply from the style they choose to employ, and thus at least partly preventable. Throughout the record, the guitars remain the primary playmakers of the team, and it felt as though the drums and vocals should have done more than merely supporting them. A few showy drum parts would have been welcome, and even some vocal eccentricity would have probably fit well in at least one or two places on the album. It’s clearly not reinventing the wheel of melodic death metal, but it’s hardly something to complain much about either, and it points in a favorable direction for what’s to come for At the Gates, who I only hope expand further upon this modernization and optimization of their sound with future releases.