Live Review : At The Gates + Nifelheim + Deserted Fear @ Academy Club, Manchester on December 18th 2019

None of us here at ROCKFLESH towers are professional journalists. Sorry to burst your bubble, but we are all enthusiastic amateurs with day jobs in areas as diverse as educational administration, ICT, accountancy and Mental Health (the last one is me). We do this for the love of the music and frankly nothing else. Because of this, our reviews tend to be more passionate and less objective than the ones you would get in Metal Hammer, NME, Kerrang etc. We talk about bands that we adore and the reasons why we adore them. We describe how the shows make us feel. We also choose which shows we cover (none of us get paid for this and half the time we have to pay to get in with the rest of you) so we tend to end up at gigs of bands that we already are extremely emotionally attached to. 

I tell you all this because the next few paragraphs are likely to be the most biased, subjective and just darn-right fanboy piece of writing you are ever going to read this year. You see, I worship the very ground that At The Gates tread upon. They mean a huge amount to me and in “Slaughter of the Soul” they have created a near damn perfect record. If you are pressed for time you can cut to the chase and give up reading here safely in the knowledge that I am going to shower lavish praises on them and proclaim that they are the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I would rather you stuck round if it is all the same.

Unlike the other two acts on the bill, Deserted Fear don’t come from Sweden (they are German), however their take on Death Metal is distinctly Swedish in style. It is full of chunky melodious riffs, big production and guttural vocals. They share a tendency for short, sharp direct songwriting with tonight’s headliners, however there is also a bombastic feel to their material that is more akin to Amon Amarth. At the end of their day though what they are is highly enjoyable.

Nifelheim have been making true Swedish Death Metal since 1990 and show no intention to deviate at all from the classic sound and from the classic look. Their stage attire tonight is a love letter to the bygone age of Bathory, Venom and Hellhammer. There is more leather, studs and bondage gear on show here than you would find in a whole row of S & M clubs in the lower east. Time has not been kind to twins Per and Erik and they seem to be both balding in exactly the same place at exactly the same time. However musically this is great fun. It is a time machine back to a less enlightened and less complicated time when Death Metal was about savagery and brutality and no one had got all het up about technicality. They are immensely enjoyable, probably mostly because they seem to be having such a whale of a time on stage. Frankly after nearly thirty years of indifference from all but the most hardcore of fans, that in itself is a monumental achievement.  

Club Academy is small and intimate, so for the two hundred or so At The Gates devotes in here, this is a rare up close and personal experience with our heroes. Throughout the gig I can see Adrian Erlandsson’s considerable biceps pulsate as he beats the shit out of his drumkit and also witness every facial contortion of Tomas Lindberg as he screams his way through the show. The set itself is pretty much standard fare and doesn’t deviate much from what they have been playing for this entire tour supporting “To Drink from the Night Itself”. The two main additions from their festivals appearances at Download and Bloodstock (and their February special guest slot with Behemoth) are the pre “Slaughter of the Soul” tracks ‘The Swarm' and 'Raped by the Light of Christ’. They are certainly faster, nastier and far more brutal than anything else in the set and remind us that before At The Gates pretty much invented Melo-death, they were a formidable Death Metal act.

As always, it is the stuff from “Slaughter of the Soul” that gets the biggest reaction. As far as Heavy Metal goes all six tracks on show are pretty much the last words in perfection. The crowd scream ‘Go’ in perfect unison at the start of the title track and that solo in 'Cold’ never ceases to send shivers down my spine each and every time it is played. I have listened to the album countless times, seen them perform songs from the record on numerous occasions and been blown away each and every time by the complexity, technicality but also the simplicity and brilliance of tracks like 'Suicide Nation’ and 'Blinded by Fear’. 

“Slaughter of the Soul” is an utter masterpiece, however the trick that At the Gates have managed to successfully pull off is to create a brace of comeback albums with songs capable of holding their own against 'Nausea' and 'Under a Serpent Sun’. 'At War with Reality’, 'The Mirror Black’ and ‘Heroes and Tombs’ (to name three) all sound magnificent tonight. The biggest plaudit to give is how quickly an eighteen song, hour and a half show passes by. One moment they are emerging to 'Drink from the Night Itself ‘ and the next minute they are departing to 'The Night Eternal’. Yes I am highly bias and yes, they could have been half-cocked tonight and I still would have been pontificating widely about their brilliance, but this evening they are nothing short of incredible. Just, just incredible.