At The Gates
With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness

THE REVIEW

“And as I dreamed the lilies white in the shade of a birch…”

These are the real At the Gates. Not those polished ones we blame for oversaturating the market with all their Swedish drones, fishermen who until a few years ago were fishing, but now wield detuned guitars and offer us thousands of Slaughter Of The Soul.

These are At the Gates, and more precisely, this is Adrian Erlandsson, not only capable of the two infamous rhythmic constructs of At the Gates: tupatupatupatupa or tututupatututututututupatutututututupa, but he also delivers charming triplets and disorienting rhythm changes worthy of a respectable drummer.

Finally, the music, beautiful. Anyone who has long digested Dark Tranquillity's immense Skydancer will easily recognize in this With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness an attempt at evolution stemming from the gorgeous harmonies crafted by the five Swedes, now decontextualized (oh my) and transplanted onto a framework reminiscent of Entombed in the Clandestine era, standard-bearers of the heaviest and most aggressive Swedish death.
Most of the riffs are in tremolo picking, but there are also the first signs of the more thrash/death rhythms that would appear in all subsequent albums.
Lindberg's vocals are very, very different from those of Slaughter-era fame, perhaps raw and imperfect, more fitting for a Vikernes (or a Skydancerian Fridèn), but never so suited to guitar lines that are at times melancholic, at times slightly dissonant, at times epic, but always original, disorienting, with a slight folk-melodic aftertaste that has made Swedish death's fortune.

Over time, At the Gates unfortunately lost their complexity, even from a lyrical standpoint (the whole album seems to be a concept on the natural purifying power of darkness and the sunset's fire; it's been known for a long time how Lindberg is a jovial drunkard), and the indiscipline typical of a young and fresh group in favor of a vaguely more easy-listening maturity that made them one of the most influential bands in extreme circles, and in my opinion, it's a great pity.

In songs like Raped By The Light Of Christ with its hallucinatory text, The Break Of Autumn with its literally impressive riffs, the long (by At the Gates' standards) Primal Breath, Stardrowned, the beautiful The Burning Darkness, Ever-Opening Flowers, Through The Red, there is no predefined structure; riffs appear and disappear suddenly like extras not well-instructed on what to do, but everything works so well that the songs flow perfectly even without the slightest geometric coherence, as if guided by instinct.

Certainly not a masterpiece for everyone, but a record that, along with Skydancer and the already different The Jester Race, is one of the most valid and important testimonies of the Swedish movement when it was still taking its first steps and wasn't so tame (see Colony just for an example).

“Jesus, no prince of my starved hell to be / No way, my world it dies with me”