At the Gates - Melodeath

What the hell happened with this band? After releasing three excellent works, the Gardens of Grief demo and the two following albums The Red in the Sky is Ours and With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness, the band devolved into a third-rate metalcore act competing with the likes of Arch Enemy and In Flames starting with their 1995 disaster Slaughter of the Soul. More like slaughter of the band's career, if you ask me. The first two At the Gates albums The Red in the Sky is Ours and With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness are this close to being included on the Morsay list alongside Demilich, Phantom and Incantation. Seriously, they are that good.

But then Slaughter of the Soul happened, and At the Gates jumped onto the metalcore band-wagon, disappearing into the horizon of more commercial, radio friendly music. Everything that made At the Gates' music great devolved starting with that album. Nothing there isn't something that wasn't already done by more successful bands. At the Gates' music had been reduced to bouncy and mechanical rhythm riffs with cheesy, popish melodies. Warmed over 'happy' rock harmonies over generic heavy metal fodder is interrupted by staccato chugging patterns on the bottom end string, a technique that would later be abused a 'nu-metal' became a thing, as a tide over for the next recombination of notes from the same typical heavy metal scales. Everything is done in a radio rock verse-chorus format to the point of nauseating repetition. It's obvious how this album influenced metalcore. 'Mad at the world' verses, 'sad at the world' choruses, and energetic 'jumpdafukup' bridges with bluesy heavy metal solos show the same ideas being assembled over and over again, album to album, into the same structural format. It's a formula that gets tiresome the first time you listen to it, as you've already heard it all before on 'safe listening' hard rock radio tunes.

All metalcore/'melodeath' bands suck, but in the case of At the Gates' the story is made even sadder by the fact that they once produced great death metal music that would go on to influence even some black metal acts - Vermin and Emperor come to mind.