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Requiem

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I've searched everywhere and can't actually find a thread dedicated exclusively to these Gothenburgers. 

This band really splits opinion around here, with a couple of die hard Alf fans, and then people like me who prefer their more melodic material.  For me, Slaughter of the Soul is one of those landmark moments in time that just blew me away in the 90s. I still love it today, but I can understand how those who like the more frenetic technicality of the first releases may not find the buzz.

However, I think the reason why I'm keen to start this thread, is due to the release of To Drink From the Night Itself which came out recently. I can't get over how good this album is. Like a lot of people, I felt a bit underwhelmed with their comeback album At War With Reality. I actually like it quite a lot, and I love parts of it, but the production was a touch too modern and phat, and it all felt a little bit off. I didn't feel it in the gut, which I think is the point of compelling melodic metal. 

As for To Drink..., this album is a masterpiece. The production has a more organic, more tangible grit to it, while still being powerful and clear. Every guitar note just hits me, it's so brilliantly produced. Russ Russell of Parlour Recording Studios in the UK deserves a grammy for his absolute mastery at drawing this sound out. It's by far the best sounding At the Gates album. I'm listening to it now on headphones and can't believe how good it sounds. Strangely, it doesn't sound anywhere near as good in my car. I blame my speakers. 

As for songwriting, I'd read online that some people say it sounds more like With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness, but I don't think it sounds anything like that album. It's much more in the Slaughter.. vein, albeit darker and more varied. 

This album just punches, yet has a sort of Dissection/Sacramentum glory to it that brings it into the epic. Fans of melodic metal are surely going to love this. It's my album of the year so far and one of those albums, like Marduk's Frontschwein that can propel a band I really like into a band I goddamn love. 

Any At the Gates fans here? 

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1 hour ago, Requiem said:

I've searched everywhere and can't actually find a thread dedicated exclusively to these Gothenburgers. 

This band really splits opinion around here, with a couple of die hard Alf fans, and then people like me who prefer their more melodic material.  For me, Slaughter of the Soul is one of those landmark moments in time that just blew me away in the 90s. I still love it today, but I can understand how those who like the more frenetic technicality of the first releases may not find the buzz.

Definitely count me among those who prefer the Svensson albums, for sure. Also, I wouldn't really call either one "more melodic" considering that how effective the use of melodies was in the beginning. While more frenetic, the sense of panic, scorn and agony often present in the first two albums is often through the composition as well as the varied instrumentation. The use of counterpoint, polyphony and unorthodox rhythm patterns was key to that.

1 hour ago, Requiem said:

However, I think the reason why I'm keen to start this thread, is due to the release of To Drink From the Night Itself which came out recently. I can't get over how good this album is. Like a lot of people, I felt a bit underwhelmed with their comeback album At War With Reality. I actually like it quite a lot, and I love parts of it, but the production was a touch too modern and phat, and it all felt a little bit off. I didn't feel it in the gut, which I think is the point of compelling melodic metal. 

At War With Reality felt completely redundant honestly. Not many interesting riffs with the added problem of uninspired half-baked melodies throughout. It's kind of ridiculous how little of it stands out to me. You'd think they had ended up learning a few new tricks from an almost 20 year hiatus. 

Also, thank you for making this thread as I was not seeing one for AtG either. 

 

1 hour ago, Requiem said:

As for To Drink..., this album is a masterpiece. The production has a more organic, more tangible grit to it, while still being powerful and clear. Every guitar note just hits me, it's so brilliantly produced. Russ Russell of Parlour Recording Studios in the UK deserves a grammy for his absolute mastery at drawing this sound out. It's by far the best sounding At the Gates album. I'm listening to it now on headphones and can't believe how good it sounds. Strangely, it doesn't sound anywhere near as good in my car. I blame my speakers. 

Having listened to the album several times, the first thing that just annoys me about it is that (even within the context of the full album) the singles are the worst tracks on the whole thing. The title track has some really milquetoast riffs and uneventful composition throughout. Not to mention that the chorus is pretty cringeworthy as well. That said, A Stare Bound in Stone and Daggers of Black Haze are far more tepid and feel like filler with the latter giving me a particularly strong urge to skip to the next track. The first half of the album is just a slog. As far as the rest of the album goes, it wasn't much better. Tracks like In Death They Shall Burn, A Labyrinth of Tombs and Seas of Starvation prove to be the best work on the album but they aren't anywhere near strong enough to make up for the duds and extra monotony present elsewhere. I mean, come on, the most interesting part of The Mirror Black was the ending. 

Despite being a perfectly reasonable 44 minutes, this album felt 20 minutes longer than that for practically all the wrong reasons. Whether it be due to sections that just drag on for much longer than needed, riffs that just blend together due to lack of variation and intensity, the intermittently grating feeling that Lindberg's vocals tend to give me post-With Fear and the more depressive aesthetic that I just find rather forced. 

I can't really complain about the production though as I had no real problems with clarity. It's a good mix. 

1 hour ago, Requiem said:

As for songwriting, I'd read online that some people say it sounds more like With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness, but I don't think it sounds anything like that album. It's much more in the Slaughter.. vein, albeit darker and more varied. 

I've seen similar claims and they're entirely baseless as the composition bears virtually no resemblance to that album at all. As for it being more varied than Slaughter, I'd actually agree. Especially in the second half where they do try to mix it up more and add more varied riffs and melodies. To me, it's to limited success but they try nonetheless. 

1 hour ago, Requiem said:

This album just punches, yet has a sort of Dissection/Sacramentum glory to it that brings it into the epic. Fans of melodic metal are surely going to love this. It's my album of the year so far and one of those albums, like Marduk's Frontschwein that can propel a band I really like into a band I goddamn love. 

I can kind of see that description despite my thinking that it falls somewhat short in that regard as well. I'm glad I gave this one a chance at the very least though. 

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"Slaughter Of The Soul" used to be one of my favorite albums, but (much like my feeling about In Flames) I've grown away from it to the point where I can barely make it through one track. I'm not a straight up Alf purist - I still enjoy "Terminal Spirit Disease" - but I do think that, for whatever reason, they stopped pushing themselves after he left.

On 5/21/2018 at 8:30 AM, Ekthelion said:

At War With Reality felt completely redundant honestly. Not many interesting riffs with the added problem of uninspired half-baked melodies throughout. It's kind of ridiculous how little of it stands out to me. You'd think they had ended up learning a few new tricks from an almost 20 year hiatus. 

 

This is exactly how I feel about it. 

One of the most annoying aspects of listening through At War With Reality (which I bought, and really tried to enjoy) is how replete it is with missed opportunities. Every song, every performance feels like it could and should have been pushed further, but instead they collectively settled for "good enough". The gap between what they could have done and what they actually did is maddening.

I'll do my best to give the new one a fair shake, but based on what I've heard of it so far, I doubt I'll love it.

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At the Gates have been unfortunately victim of their own redundancy. I listened to their new album, felt uninspired. The title track is decent, but only because it has a somewhat catchy main riff to back up a pretty lackluster/watered down chorus. Though, that final violin segment in A Mirrior Black was completely unnecessary in my opinon. I've never understood the appeal of mindlessly adding unorthodox instruments into the mix wihtout a sense of general direction, which is what this album needs the most. 

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After a couple of listens, I'm liking the new one better than I thought I would. Lots of boilerplate, but I think the melodic sections are stronger and more interesting than their last outing, and I like the layers of clean guitar used as texture here and there. Tomas sounds good, too, more expressive and stronger than I was expecting. Too bad Adrian is still phoning it in - he uses the same few patterns throughout the entire album and that combines with the homogeneity of the guitars to drag things down for me. Overall I think it's a good step up from their last one, and for that matter it's more in line with my taste these days than SOTS. Not a masterpiece, but maybe a better-than-average Swedish melodeath album with a handful of parts worth looking forward to.

On 5/21/2018 at 2:30 PM, MattCantina said:

At the Gates have been unfortunately victim of their own redundancy. I listened to their new album, felt uninspired. The title track is decent, but only because it has a somewhat catchy main riff to back up a pretty lackluster/watered down chorus. Though, that final violin segment in A Mirrior Black was completely unnecessary in my opinon. I've never understood the appeal of mindlessly adding unorthodox instruments into the mix wihtout a sense of general direction, which is what this album needs the most. 

I actually think the title track is the weakest song on the album, to the point that I'd probably skip it if I end up listening to this more frequently. I kind of get what you're saying about the strings, but I didn't mind them at all; they've always used string parts here and there, and I don't get the sense that this was an attempt to be experimental or edgy at all, just a little flourish to close out the album.

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17 hours ago, FatherAlabaster said:

After a couple of listens, I'm liking the new one better than I thought I would. Lots of boilerplate, but I think the melodic sections are stronger and more interesting than their last outing, and I like the layers of clean guitar used as texture here and there. Tomas sounds good, too, more expressive and stronger than I was expecting. Too bad Adrian is still phoning it in - he uses the same few patterns throughout the entire album and that combines with the homogeneity of the guitars to drag things down for me. Overall I think it's a good step up from their last one, and for that matter it's more in line with my taste these days than SOTS. Not a masterpiece, but maybe a better-than-average Swedish melodeath album with a handful of parts worth looking forward to.

I actually think the title track is the weakest song on the album, to the point that I'd probably skip it if I end up listening to this more frequently. I kind of get what you're saying about the strings, but I didn't mind them at all; they've always used string parts here and there, and I don't get the sense that this was an attempt to be experimental or edgy at all, just a little flourish to close out the album.

I'll give it another spin just in case. Though, it's a while I don't listen to ATG or modern melodeath in general

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On 5/22/2018 at 4:30 AM, MattCantina said:

At the Gates have been unfortunately victim of their own redundancy. I listened to their new album, felt uninspired. The title track is decent, but only because it has a somewhat catchy main riff to back up a pretty lackluster/watered down chorus. Though, that final violin segment in A Mirrior Black was completely unnecessary in my opinon. I've never understood the appeal of mindlessly adding unorthodox instruments into the mix wihtout a sense of general direction, which is what this album needs the most. 

I think the inclusion of small amounts of acoustic guitar, keys and strings adds a real degree of magisterial darkness to the whole album. I think if those elements were missing, we would still have a really well produced and interesting metal album, but those tasteful additional elements raise it up into the grandiose and epic. It makes me want to howl at the stars. The end of The Mirror Black is transcendent. What a moment. 

Even without those elements, the tone of the guitars and Tomas's voice just please my ears no end. I can't believe how good the album sounds. 

Given the mute reception it's receiving from the small number of forum members here who have voiced an opinion, this could just be a quirk of Requiem's taste. But yeah, it's a winner in my book. 

As a side note, I put the new Amorphis album Queen of Time on yesterday straight after To Drink... and I nearly had to turn it off, so weak, polished and light-weight it felt by comparison, both aurally and emotionally. 

 

 

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It’s grown on me, I am still bemused by Req’s fawning love it but each to their own.  It will never make more than background music, but definitely a has reaped more positives the more I have played it.  Not a massive melodeath fan tbf so this may be the most upbeat I get about it.

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2 hours ago, MacabreEternal said:

It’s grown on me, I am still bemused by Req’s fawning love it but each to their own.  It will never make more than background music, but definitely a has reaped more positives the more I have played it.  Not a massive melodeath fan tbf so this may be the most upbeat I get about it.

Well, I love melodic metal like Insomnium, Dark Tranquility, Wintersun, God Dethroned, Dissection etc, so that’s the basis of my “fawning love” for this album. I think the genre is hitting a new golden age and it’s exciting.

I don’t expect everyone to feel this way - especially people not really into melodeath.

 

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I gave that new AtG album a secondary spin this morning. Now I can tolerate fairly well most of the songs, but it still lacks memorability to me, with the exception of a few moments. Though I think it's one of their best works to date, Gardens of Grief and The red in The Skies is Ours will always hold the no#1 spot.

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One ‘issue’ I take with it is that Tomas’s lyrics are again either deeply symbolic or deeply shallow and random. It was like this on the previous album too.

While his vocal delivery is great, the words themselves are all standard black/death cliches of meaningless darkness. 

I just wish he would open his soul a little bit and make the words more immediately personal. Not too much, but a bit more sense. That would give some greater meaning and direction to my listening experience. 

It used to be “22 years of pain and [he] can feel it closing in”. Now it’s (and I’m paraphrasing) “Black labyrinths of red dawns. Echoes of abstract symbols” and such like. It’s like he’s put 200 ‘extreme’ words in a hat and pulled them out randomly to form sentences. It’s cool enough, I guess, but I’m emo enough to want meaning.

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6 hours ago, Requiem said:

One ‘issue’ I take with it is that Tomas’s lyrics are again either deeply symbolic or deeply shallow and random. It was like this on the previous album too.

While his vocal delivery is great, the words themselves are all standard black/death cliches of meaningless darkness. 

I just wish he would open his soul a little bit and make the words more immediately personal. Not too much, but a bit more sense. That would give some greater meaning and direction to my listening experience. 

It used to be “22 years of pain and [he] can feel it closing in”. Now it’s (and I’m paraphrasing) “Black labyrinths of red dawns. Echoes of abstract symbols” and such like. It’s like he’s put 200 ‘extreme’ words in a hat and pulled them out randomly to form sentences. It’s cool enough, I guess, but I’m emo enough to want meaning.

His lyrics have always been this way. It's not like SOTS or even the first two albums were marvels of poetic personal revelation. They're pretty much all a grab bag of final suicidal angel darkness.

The whole thing makes me want to program a Tomas Lindberg lyric generator.

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