“Melodic Death Metal”? At the Gates LIVE! at Psycho Las Vegas 2022
So, after posts featuring all-girl dream pop outfit Warpaint and hip hop act Bone Thugs‐n‐Harmony, I figured I’d get back to what Psycho Las Vegas was really about – metal! In this case, pioneering Swedish death metal band At the Gates.
At the Gates hail from Gothenburg (the second-largest city in Sweden). The band was originally called The Dwellers at the Gates of Silent Memory (named after a song by 80s goth-rock outfit Fields of the Nephilim) for about a week before the members decided to shorten it.
The band pioneered what is now known as melodic death metal, or the ‘Gothenburg Sound’ (since all of them came from that city).
Did somebody say “melodic death metal”? Well, it might not sound all that melodic to someone listening to death metal for the very first time but yes, there’s actually some melody mixed into all those gut-churning riffs and noxious vocals. Trust me on this.
At the Gates released their first full-length album “The Red in the Sky Is Ours” in 1992 after the group had been together for only one year. Decibel magazine awarded the album an induction into the Decibel Magazine Hall of Fame in September 2014.
Their 1995 album “Slaughter of the Soul” was seen as a landmark in the mid-1990s Swedish death metal scene. Metal Injection ranked Slaughter of the Soul eighth on their list “Top 10 Influential Heavy Metal Albums” and in 2017, Rolling Stone ranked the album as 79th on their list of “The 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time“.
At The Gates would disband in 1996 and its members would go on to form other bands and/or work with other bands; but in 2007, At the Gates announced several reunion shows for mid-2008. But it wasn’t until 2014 that the band would release a new album, “At War with Reality”
“At War with Reality” was the band’s first album to chart in multiple countries. It peaked at number three on the Swedish chart Sverigetopplistan and reached number 53 on the US Billboard 200.
The band would go on to release “To Drink from the Night Itself”, which was released through Century Media Records in 2018 and their seventh studio album, the critically acclaimed “The Nightmare of Being”, on July 2, 2021.
At Psycho Las Vegas, all they did was kick ass all over the outdoor pool stage at Resorts World Las Vegas to a SRO crowd of rabid headbangers. You know, the ones that love melody in their death metal.
Enjoy the photographs…
