Dangling as distended puppet strings from a long dormant rotted hand, each noose that hangs from the burnt and stripped-clean branches of the great arching yew above offers its own open-ended sky burial, waving an ancient death-banner in the face of the doomed observer. Bruges, Belgium-based solo death/doom metal act Gateway manifest the voice of death, the Grendel in providing antithesis to civil modernity as their barbarous step now achieves its second full-length album. Eight years and countless shortform releases beyond their previous LP ‘Galgendood‘ takes us to the medieval gallows before speaking in tongues, incantating great daimonian forces spreading ominous curse across the gathered polis. Bringing their classicist touch to a homebrewed insignia the artist finds a wretched, most feral pit to extract from in conjuring the grotesque expanse depicted within this finest yet sophomore album.

Gateway formed in 2014 after Robin van Oyen (Terre) repurposed some of the ideas taken from an exploratory industrial metal project (Wooomb) which he’d been toying with during 2013. The outcome was surely homebrewed and continues to maintain that underground solo act scrape on some level but it’d nonetheless caught on with regard to the always-thirsty death/doom metal crowd at a time when Spectral Voice tapes and such were driving the need for more cavernous extreme doom. Today we can look back at their sound as something related to the exaggerative drones of Coffins and the mechanical claustrophobia of Rigor Sardonicus which today should speak to fans of groups like Eternal Rot thanks to their similarly over the top use of studio effects etc. and the expanse of sound depicted. As I’d said back in 2021 in my review of the ‘Flesh Reborn‘ mLP it’d make sense to reference the ‘Darkness Drips Forth’ album from Hooded Menace, which’d sat on the verge of funeral death/doom, to some degree but this album is a bit different. Since that previous mLP outshined past work from the artist for my taste and this sets some extra hype on the formidably jacked shoulders of Gateway as they return.

Plodding within their buzzed-forth riffs and exaggerative in their nearly vomited vocal roar Gateway use plenty of reverb to create an echoing chamber of medieval rituals with primal skull-bashing horror in mind. In practical terms this means the artist holds a tighter-than-ever grip on the level of control he uses to present extreme doom metal songs. By inching away from the loosened Disembowelment-esque whirr of pieces like “Slumbering Crevasses” on the previous mLP the artist switches things to a steadier form of stamped-at blasts for the rockier rhythms on the album, such as those ~2:58 minutes into opener “The Coexistence of Dismal Entities” where we could feasibly give a referential nod to a group like Slugathor instead. The atmosphere Gateway builds right from the start is palpable and they’ve done a fine job of curating the first three pieces for impact.

Guitar feedback, screaming harmonics, and steadier-riding riffs which plateau into ‘…For Victory‘-esque peaks help to further differentiate this second full-length from the band. “Sacrificial Blood Oath in the Temple of K’zadu” stands out in this regard for its wriggling melodic lines amongst flurries of pinch harmonics. That shouldn’t suggest that the whole of this ~half hour record is spent chunking away at particular elaborate abysmal riffs and molten guitar shrieks since a few pieces lean into dark ambient marches (“Nachtritueel”) or drifting, disconnected drains (“Dagritueel”) both of which serve as ritualistic droning pieces that lend extra atmospheric character to the experience.

One of the more impressive and immersive songs on the admittedly short full listen comes by way of the multi-headed closing track “Galgendood / Dagritueel / Duvelsput”, the best representative piece of Gateway‘s greater palette in one shot and one of few ‘experimental’ feeling ventures on the album which presents a three tiered set of ideas. The break in the middle of the song (again, an ambient piece “Dagritueel”) impressed in that it presents some key rhythmic nuances of the full listen and comes surrounded by some of the main motifs which keep the full listen of ‘Galgendood‘ feasibly memorable for its nightmarish touch. — There isn’t much else to dig into here in terms of deeper analysis, this ends up being an enjoyable and particularly heavy release from the artist who has made good on the progress made beyond their reformation circa 2020 with a solid second LP. A moderately high recommendation.

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