At The Gates

The Red in the Sky Is Ours (1992)

It is probably no accident that this album causes the most divergence in opinions in the entire Death Metal genre. The compositional style of The Red in the Sky is Ours is certainly not conventional in the popular music sense (I use this term in its broadest sense - encompassing modern music). Immediately noticeable is the fluid approach to melody, it is rare to find abrupt or jarring rhythmic changes for which the genre is well known. It is closer to a string concerto in this sense. The use of dissonant counterpoint, serialism and other such techniques that are often only used sparingly, if at all, by Metal acts, helps build melodic texture and shading within each song. This allows the band to build a strange, twisted, and all-over outlandish atmosphere that is very post-modern in feel. Melody bursts upon the listener at bullet-like speed. However within the chaotic aesthetic, the magic feel of the composition begins to become immersive, like rain drops gently falling through a forest canopy. The tragic poetry of wisdom and of a dying kingdom, wash the listener away into lands far beyond our mortal realm. Like an hallucination inspired by Naked Lunch, scattered ideas coalesce to form a vision that an outsider could only describe as a chaotic mess. In the spirit of this type of art, the band takes fragments of experiences and splices them into a holistic vision that can only be appreciated in unity. Perhaps the most compositionally aware piece of music in all of Death Metal. 

At the Gates masterfully send the soul on a journey in search of meaning, a chance to transcend the sorrow of our bleak, irrational existence. Often the answers are not as pleasing as we may hope, but still remains, if only a flickering light, a shred of hope that the suffering may one day end.

Gardens of Grief (1991) 

Fast tremolo picked death metal riffs, with a black metal melodic sensibility, swarm with the ferocity of a locust swarm, circling the thematic carcass that rots at the middle of this other-worldly work. Complex changes in both mood and riff placement abound, creating a post-modern feel of irrationality and paranoia. God is dead, man sits morbidly silent in the middle of his own self-destruction, his fabled garden of grief; deprived of meaning and empathy in a world of gloom and sorrow. Let chaos reign and cleanse us of our earthly sins.