ALBUM REVIEW: At The Gates, ‘To Drink From The Night Itself’

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 Gatesthat 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.

‘To Drink From the Night Itself’is available digitally here and on CD/LP here.

Band info: Facebook