(We present DGR‘s review of the second album by the death metal band After Life from the Basque Country of Spain, which was released on February 14th.)

It’s never easy to tell which direction the yearly handful of riff-landslide albums is going to come from. The annual tradition of finding said albums is fairly predictable at this point, and sometimes if the gods be kind then the harvest will be good and we’ll have four-to-five of them on our plates. But the areas from which they’ll come are less predictable and there’s always a chance to get blindsided.

In this case the album arrives courtesy of Spain, the group After Life, and their sophomore album Gates Of Madness. Arriving six years after their first release, Gates Of Madness moves with an extreme sense of urgency and rarely – if ever – lets up. Appearances can be deceiving because at first glance you might see the band and assume you know exactly what you’re in for, then about a minute and a half into the first song After Life completely change form into something that could see them drawing comparisons to high-speed riff monsters like Cytotoxin, Murder Made God, the sadly split-up Kronos, and weirdly enough…Meshuggah? Continue reading »