Album Review: The Gates of Slumber, The Gates of Slumber
The last full-length offering from Indianapolis traditionalist doomers The Gates of Slumber was The Wretch in 2011, and it’s been a long road getting from there to their self-titled sixth album, also their first outing through Svart Records. Begun in 1998 in the message-board era of internet-based doomly proliferation, and led in the present by founding guitarist/vocalist Karl Simon, the band’s six-song/35-minute return opus features bassist/backing vocalist Steve Janiak (also guitar/vocals in Apostle of Solitude, Devil to Pay) and drummer Chuck Brown (also also guitar/vocals in Apostle of Solitude), a lineup that first came together in 2019. The occasion at that point was a return performance at Germany’s Hell Over Hammaburg festival in — wait for it — March 2020.
That fest actually happened (it was early in the month), but of course there wouldn’t be much opportunity for building momentum from there as a global pandemic shut down the world. Already at that point, the band’s path had been tumultuous, from the 2014 passing of then-former bassist Jason McCash after The Gates of Slumber‘s final release, 2013’s Scion A/V-backed Stormcrow EP (review here) and disbanding. As Simon moved forward to release a self-titled debut (review here) with a new trio, Wretch, in 2016, who also toured that year and the next in the US and Europe, issuing the EP Bastards Born (review here) in 2017 and making live appearances right up to an East Coast run in Spring 2019, the path back to The Gates of Slumber is somewhat tumultuous, but the point is that the music never really stopped — there was also the Gates live album, Live in Tempe, Arizona (discussed here), in 2020 — and the fact that the Simon/Janiak/Brown lineup have been playing together for five years in addition to knowing each other for probably decades by virtue of their respective tenures in the Indy underground might account for some of the cohesion heard across the material on The Gates of Slumber. Or it might just be that they know what the fuck they’re doing with slow riffs and morose vibes. Take your pick.
Either way, The Gates of Slumber is a clear and concise statement of intent and declaration of self on the part of the band who made it, perhaps nowhere more so than on the four-minute side B leadoff “At Dawn.” While certainly not the first time the band has conjured a gallop in their quarter-century-plus history, the chug the trio ride there is particularly fluid. By that point in the proceedings, the revamped dynamic has already been unveiled, as Janiak not only takes a backing role on vocals for the grueling-but-catchy opening cut “Embrace the Lie” but handles some leads as well, going on to anchor the extinction-themed, later-Iommi-hued chorus of the subsequent “We Are Perdition” with an effective drawling delivery of the lyric “…global holocaust” before side A capper “Full Moon Fever” begins the tempo kick that “At Dawn” will push further, Brown‘s drums slow-swinging in classic fashion behind some harsher vocal delve from Simon in the song’s middle, before the scorching solo and march into the gradual fadeout take hold to comprise the back half.
Already by that point the message that The Gates of Slumber are “back” has come through clearly, but in terms of aesthetic, their revelry of course takes a darker, more depressive hue. After “At Dawn” — which is neither the first fast or short song the band has ever had but stands out here nonetheless — The Gates of Slumber redirects to its closing duo, the seven-minutes-apiece pairing of “The Fog” and “The Plague,” the former of which rumbles out a lonely bassline before crashing in at full volume. It’s not quite like slamming into a wall, and even here the shifting character of the band can be heard in some of Janiak‘s punchthrough flourish in the low end, but the feeling of having arrived is palpable just the same as the initial chants begin, reminding the audience that this is a band who might consider the likes of Reverend Bizarre as peers, and whose roll has served as a catalyst for others in the style in the past. On a record brimming with doom, “The Fog” and “The Plague” both are especially doomed. A righteous culmination in “The Fog” after Simon‘s solo brings a crashout finish, and standalone guitar begins “The Plague” with due foreboding.
If “The Plague” is the payoff for the album as a whole — and it makes arguments for being thought of that way — then it’s all the more appropriate how much it reaffirms who The Gates of Slumber are while looking ahead to how that might continue to take shape over the course of this incarnation of the band. Slightly shorter than the song before, it is more willful in its slog, and thereby suitable to the subject of its title, and doubly notable for the coming together of Simon and Janiak for harmonies in the early hook before the song takes off on a Saint Vitus-esque shove leading to an eventual crawling return and shift back into that chorus, all the more effective the second time around for having so strongly declared itself the first. Even in that moment, the band remains identifiably The Gates of Slumber, but the element of ‘something new happening here’ isn’t to be discounted, and this isn’t the first time an established doom act has been richer sonically as a result of bringing Janiak on board. Some players make everyone around them sound better.
Whether or not “The Plague” is telling as to the future direction of The Gates of Slumber can’t really be known until when and if they do something after it, and a more immediate consideration is the fact that despite having significant ’00s and ’10s laurels to rest upon, they don’t, and that a crucial facet of this self-titled — the band stating in no uncertain terms this is who they are, right down to the minimalist black-on-black logo album cover because what’s the point of art or for that matter anything? — is what it adds to the scope of the band’s take on doom. It makes the record more than just a comeback for the band, reassuring that along with the grim point of view that’s informed their work all along and their commitment to a firm idea of what doom metal is and does, they’re finding spaces in which to progress and continuing to leave their stamp on the genre. The Gates of Slumber had long since earned a place among the finest American doom of the last 25 years. That they sound so hungry as well as so miserable results in an odd hopefulness for things to come. I’ll skip the hyperbole in the spirit of a band so clearly bent on purging bullshit from their sound, but at the very least, doom should be so lucky as to have The Gates of Slumber as the band’s hard-won new beginning.
The Gates of Slumber, The Gates of Slumber (2024)
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Tags: Indiana, Indianapolis, self-titled, Svart Records, The Gates of Slumber, The Gates of Slumber Self-titled
Nice review, man, Karl delivers the goods once again!