Review: At The Gates “To Drink From The Night Itself”

In contradistinction to many bands and some fellow countrymen, Swedes At The Gates are remain true to themselves and chosen genre Melodic Death Metal, no matter what: break in creativity, the band’s split and line-up changes. And their new album To Drink From The Night Itself proves it for the eighth time.

At The Gates returned to the stage in 2014 after seven-years decay. For the joy of fans the band had return with original line-up and recorded the great At War With Reality. But in 2017 one of the band’s founders Anders Björler leaves the band. He was replaced by Jonas Stålhammar and At The Gates started to work on a new material.

To Drink From The Night Itself is a conceptual album, based on a huge work of Peter Weiss – “The Aesthetics Of Resistance”, where he explains how the art can be a weapon against violence, dictatorship, suppression and oppression. Vocalist Tomas Lindberg says: “We’re not a political band, but it’s a very left-wing book. Basically, this book is a real brick. Well over 1,000 pages. No chapters, just words and more words. He goes through the whole history of the Resistance in Europe during the ‘30s and ‘40s on different levels. His main characters are these art students, typical left-wing people. There’s discussion about art and how it can be used as a tool for oppression or revolution or resistance. I’m very intrigued by the whole essence of it. To Drink From The Night Itself, for me, stands for that. To live through art. Make it mean something. Not to look back. Just make art. Our art means a lot to us. It’s the reason why we get up in the morning. So, we drink from the night itself. And I think our fans do too. The night is a metaphor for the essence of pure art”.

Musically, To Drink From The Night Itself is a classic oldschool Swedish Melodic Death Metal: fast and powerful drums, ferocious riffs, melodic solos and great Tomas Lindberg’s vocals, where not only anger and aggression can be heard, but some tragedy also. Though, this entire splendor has the other side of the coin: the album is so solid that it can be easily called monotonous. Insomuch, that seems that the band used the same riff in couple of songs (or similar riff at least).  Also this can be said about songs’ structure.

Honestly, it’s hard for me to say something univocal about To Drink From The Night Itself: on one hand it’s a good, powerful work with deep conception. On the other hand the feeling that I’m listening to one, too long song, which is boring after 40 minutes, does not leave me. So let everyone decide himself.

To Drink From The Night Itself will be released on May, 18-th via Century Media Records.