vote
7.5
- Bands:
LIVING GATE - Duration: 00:40:43
- Available from: 10/25/2024
- Label:
-
Relapse Records
Streaming not yet available
From a group that includes among its ranks people like Yob (bassist Aaron Rieseberg), Oathbreaker (Wim Sreppoc and Levy Seynaeve, drums and guitar respectively) and Amenra (Lennart Bossu on the other guitar), everything could be expected except that a record like “Suffer As One”.
In fact, forget any minimal post-metal or doom influence, Living Gate's music drowns in the mud of American-style death metal, halfway between the brutality of Suffocation, a pinch of Morbid Angel from the period with Tucker and the less hallucinated Gorguts. While on the one hand it makes you wonder if we really need yet another band to fish out that type of sound, on the other hand it must be said that “Suffer As One” is so well done that any type of skepticism takes its toll.
Starting from the production, sufficiently organic and clean without ever losing sight of that murky attitude that makes everything less glossy, up to the songs themselves, Living Gate bring out a sincere tribute to records such as “The Erosion Of Sanity”, “Pierced From Within” or “Formulas Fatal To The Flesh” trying to put something of their own into it, albeit in a small way.
If “A Unified Soul” and “Internal Decomposition” sound Suffocation to the core, just as “Destroy And Consume” pays total tribute to the monolithic nature of Morbid Angel (and a pinch of the more extreme Opeth in the riffing), there are frequent references to Luc Lemay's inspiration; the opening track “To Cut Off The Head Of The Snake”, “Overcome, Overthorw” or “Ones And Zeroes” delve into less orthodox and dissonant guitar constructions, for example. Of course, we are light years away from the genius of records like “Obscura” but the result is still excellent and deserving of applause.
Even when some pieces may sound a little too schooly – most of the title track or “Haunting Maggots” seem to come straight from an album like “Souls To Deny” – the group sporadically indulges in less orthodox and atmospheric passages ( term to be taken with a pinch of salt) which avoid mere copying and pasting, as in the convoluted and progressive “Atoms And Particles”.
Eleven tracks for forty minutes of music that invents nothing but will put a big smile on the face of anyone who grew up with the giants of a genre, death metal, which however inflated is still capable of inspiring.
Every now and then, even in the face of outputs at the limit of the derivative, a nice “who cares” regarding this last characteristic is a must.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM