At The Gates
At War With Reality

Let me tell you the tale of a place called Gothenburg. This medium sized city on the Swedish west coast played a major part in the hard rock scene in the mid 90's and the reason comes down to something as boring as economy. In the early 90's, Sweden went through the worse financial period in modern times - worse than during the oil crisis in the 70's. Worse than the bank crashes of the late 00's. Unemployment was sky rocketing, people had to leave their houses because of the high interest and smaller businesses went bankrupt in quick succession. But there was one thing the unemployed youths of the lower classes could do on their spare time and that was music!

In this era, a movement inspired by Entombed and bands like them was dwelling in Swedens second biggest city and soon the fruits of that movement started to grow. In Flames, Dark Tranquillity, Crown Of Thorns, Cermonial Oath, Tiamat and of course At The Gates took their place on the stage. By 1995 some of these bands had grown bigger than others and in that year the biggest milestone of the so called Gotheburg death metal scene was released to the world: Slaughter. Of. The. Soul.

To make an album like 'Slaughter Of The Soul' is both a blessing and a curse, because how do you continue from that? How can you possibly triumph an album like that? The band obviously felt they couldn't and split up just a year after their biggest hit. For many years the band was disbanded and half the band went to The Haunted where they had continued success. Adrian Erlandsson left that band too pretty fast and went to Cradle Of Filth. Anders Björler left the band just last year when he wanted to put more focus on At The Gates again but his twin brother Jonas can still be heard in the old new band while doing the old… eh… old band reunited. All five members are back and despite saying they wouldn't make a successor if it took them more than ten years, they've finally - I repeat - FINALLY, 19 years after 'Slaughter Of The Soul' made a new At The Gates album. Finally!

Expectations and hopes has probably peaked a while ago and though I'm guessing they're still pretty high it would surprise me if people still expected a masterpiece after all these years. It's not an easy task to follow up the hype and cult of such a classic as 'Slaughter Of The Soul' and if anything I think it's only become more difficult with time to please the fans but after a few years touring and playing together it's natural to feel the urge to do a new album. My only concern would be if they tried to make a "Slaughter Of The Soul 2" and as I listen to the intro El Altar Del Dios Desconocido, a spoken word track in Spanish, my hopes and wishes of the band not doing a sequel only increase. As Death And The Labyrinth opens the album for real I don't really know what they've done and it's first by the track The Circular Ruins that I'm starting to feel that maybe this can go all the way after all. As the tracks keeps coming the quality only feel better and better and the only thing I'm still missing as we head into the double digit track numbers is a song of such dignity as Blinded By Fear… which unfortunately isn't coming in the closing tracks either. However, as the album nears the end they're definitely put a more technical and precision work touch on the album, which is a good thing.

'At War With Reality' is definitely not an attempt to do 'Slaughter Of The Soul' two. I've played that album many times and to be extra sure I've given it a few more spins between the runs of 'At War With Reality' and only increased my feeling of this being a new album instead of an attempt to remake an old one twenty or so years later (ehemmmqueensrÿche). And I have to say it's not especially like any of the other albums the band released before that either - the less melodic and somewhat darker albums. 'At War With Reality' is a melodic album, but it's also dark and it's pretty fast - though maybe not crazy fast as they could be on their first four albums. The Book Of Sand (The Abomination) seems to be the fastest track, at least as far as I can tell, but it's not near the whiplash-headshaking frenzy of the old band. But speed isn't everything. Speed is good but when I hear these songs I can hear a depth that I just haven't heard in too many of the melodic death metal albums since 1995. And for some reason, this album really makes it clear to me why At The Gates came to define this genre along with Dark Tranquillity and In Flames - because they were and obviously still are best in the world in making this kind of music. It's as simple as that.

When they take out those really technical guitars and hits those mega bass lines this album just feels awesome! Unfortunately there are also a few tracks that feels a bit like fillers and not so special. As a whole, though, I think it's a really good album but maybe it lacks that extra magic it could have had. It's not that it's disappointing and I think the more they write and play together as At The Gates the better it will get and coser to the magic we had in "you know which" but this album isn't and doesn't have that magic. But it is 45 minutes of really good melodic death metal and fans of which should start drooling.

We've made more than 70 Hallowed references to At The Gates in reviews of other bands. I never thought I would refer to other bands from them. 'At War With Reality' shows us that 19 years only is a number and this is as good or even better than most of which they did in the 90's. Welcome back At The Gates!

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