Slaughter of the Soul

I listened to this album a lot in the 90s. Mostly at night, while playing Quake on the network at boarding school. They went well together - roughly contemporary and thematically similar. I didn't listen to a lot of metal outside of this at the time. I was more about skate- and ska-punk at the time, but, unbeknownst to me At The Gates sowed a seed.

A couple (nearly three...sheesh) decades later, and metal is something I listen to more regularly. But I have some limitations that are more lyrical than stylistic. I don't like the ultra-violent lyrics that seem to be part of the more extreme metal, which limits me a bit in available supply. But I make do. I'll write another post another day about my favourite metal bands that don't cross my line for ultra-violence.

Back to Slaughter of the Soul.

It's a pretty relentless album, that throws you in the deep end with Blinded By Fear. A track that opens with rending metallic sounds, and a spoken Luke Rhinehart quote, before launching into the main riff.

We are blind to the worlds within us
Waiting to be born

It's surprisingly melodic, and the vocals are not what you would normally expect from a metal band (or, more accurately, wasn't what you'd have expected of a metal band in the mid-90s) in that they are melodic too - in a guttoral and nearly screechy way.

The intensity is maintained for four tracks until it's time for intermission with Into The Dead Sky which is a nylon-string acoustic guitar driven instrumental piece with some very athmospheric bass, drum, and panning effects. Then it's back into it at full fury until the end of the album.

⭐⭐⭐⭐