(It’s with a heavy heart, and a deep sense of responsibility, that Andy Synn sets out to give the new album from the one-and-only At The Gates – featuring the final recorded performance of the dearly-departed Tomas Lindberg – a proper eulogy in advance of its release next week)
Ever since I first received my copy of The Ghost of a Future Dead I’ve been struggling… not just with what to say about it, but how to say it.
After all, any time a new release from a seminal, life-changing band like this one – I’m sure that a fair few people reading this now probably owe their Metal awakening to the seminal Slaughter of the Soul – appears people are inevitably going to come at it with a whole host of preconceived notions, opinions, and expectations, and the last thing some of those people want to hear is any actual criticism.
And when you add in the fact that not only is this the last At The Gates album featuring their much-loved, and much-missed, vocalist Tomas Lindberg, but it also might even be the last At The Gates album ever (as the band, understandably, have acknowledged that they have no idea if they’ll want or be able to continue without their fallen frontman) that makes it even harder to know exactly how to approach things.
But, thankfully, messrs. Lindberg, Larsson, Erlandsson, Björler and Björler were kind enough to make at least one part of my task easy… as The Ghost of a Future Dead is the band’s best album in over a decade.
Of course, how much weight that particular statement carries depends on a couple of different things, namely how you feel about the band’s post-comeback output – I’m on record as being a huge fan of the mournful, melancholy mien of At War With Reality, for example, but much less so when it comes to the rather paint-by-numbers To Drink From the Night Itself and the slightly more ambitious, but directionless, The Nightmare of Being – and how much (or how little) you respect my opinions as a writer/reviewer.
But even the band themselves seem to have acknowledged that, if this is going to be their last hurrah together, they’re going to go out all guns blazing, with both the the Björler brothers (who, reunited at last, continue to form the primary writing team behind the band’s music) stating that their intent was for this album to be more stripped-down, more straightforward, and just that little bit more savage, than their last couple of releases.
And, wouldn’t you know it, the likes of “The Fever Mask” and “The Dissonant Void” quickly establish the truth of this statement, marrying all the signature elements of the At The Gates sound – those choppy, down-picked riffs and rippling tremolo melodies, rich, rumbling bass lines and insidiously infectious leads, guided by Erlandsson’s unwaveringly precise percussive patterns and then injected with an extra dose of Lindberg’s trademark vocal venom – with a renewed sense of urgency and intensity that comes from knowing that this time, more than any other, they truly have to make every second count.
What’s particularly interesting, however, is that while The Ghost… is undoubtedly a leaner, meaner album than either of its immediate predecessors it also hasn’t forgotten the lessons learned along the way, with broodingly bombastic highlights like “Det Det Oerhörda” and “In Dark Distortion” occasionally recalling – and I admit this might be a bit of a “hot take” (if you’ll excuse the terminally-online vernacular) – The Haunted‘s misunderstood 2006 masterpiece, The Dead Eye (which was primarily written, if memory serves, by Anders Björler, whose creative fingerprints are all over this album too), in the way they seamlessly weave some of the group’s more subtly proggy songwriting sensibilities into the mix without detracting from the overall impact of the music.
And, make no mistake about it, the hefty impact and hell-for-leather intensity of the likes of “A Ritual of Waste”, “The Unfathomable” and “The Phantom Gospel” – three of the heaviest and most unforgiving tracks on the album, especially the latter pair (which just so happen to be two of my personal favourites) – is impossible to deny, as is the electrifying melodic energy of a song such as “Tomb of Heaven”, which only further reinforces this sense of the band knowing they only have one shot at this, so they absolutely have to deliver.
That’s not to claim that The Ghost… is perfect, of course – while the hit rate is very high, I feel like closing with the sombre strains of “Förgängligheten” (transl: “Transience” or “Mortality”) would have served the album better as an elegant instrumental elegy for one of Metal’s most beloved voices – and the more cynical among you might observe that Lindberg doesn’t sound quite as sharp as he did in his prime… but considering that a) the man only finished recording the day before going in for surgery, and b) even at less than 100% his glass-chewing, existentially-anguished delivery is as commanding and charismatic as ever, his performance here will likely remain the benchmark for an entire generation of Death Metal mic-maulers for a long time to come.
So, if this is indeed the band’s swan-song (no, not that one, thankfully), I can’t think of a better way for them to go out than with an album that adds yet another gem to their already legendary legacy – which, just in case you forgot, gave us such classics as With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness and Slaughter of the Soul even before they made their big comeback with At War With Reality – and helps ensure, once and for all, that the ghost of At The Gates, and the presence of their formidable frontman, will always be with us.