GATEWAY
GATEWAY “Galgendood”
By Dr. Abner Mality
An army of trolls with spatulas couldn’t scrape all the grime and filth off of this release. Ugly and raw death metal is for sure a trend again, but this goes yet another step beyond most and makes hyped stuff like SANGUISUGABOGG and 200 STAB WOUNDS sound as prim and proper as a schoolmarm. The Transcending Obscurity label is known for a love of death-doom...the recent 71TONMAN being a great example...but GATEWAY is about the last word on the subject.
And that’s what makes this stand out. No attempt is made here to clean things up at all...there’s no “Peaceville 3” type stuff, no Southern-tinged or ethereal gloom...it’s foul and ugly sewage, like a mix of the doomier side of early INCANTATION and BOLT THROWER. The slowest part of GATEWAY is along the lines of DEAD CONGREGATION, whereas old BOLT THROWER comes in when things hit a diseased mid-paced trudge. The occasional blast livens things up. There’s also something about the production here...a kind of caustic “scraping” sound...that adds another layer of torment. You hear it from the first seconds of “The Coexistence of Dismal Entities”.
This thing just utterly CRUSHES! After a grim and dripping instrumental interlude “Nachtritueel” (Evocation), they slam into “Scourged At Dawn”, which is the best of GATEWAY’s more mid-paced tanks, and then that mutates into “Bog Bodies Near The Humid Crypt” and my God, what a fat, gross pile of grooving slime this is! The bass sound is almost indescribable. Every track on “Galgendood” merges with the other, resulting in one huge mass.
These Belgians haven’t really come up with anything new, but they excel by just pouring on the heaviness until you’re ready to sink to the bottom of the swamp.