Peaceville Records (1992)

R.I.P.

At the Gates

1990 – 1993

Listening to this Gothenburg foursome perform their serpentine, sacrilegious hymns feels like an elderly undertaker struggling to read the bumpy headstone rubbings that the group’s limber studs (Svennson and Erlandsson) plus their easy-riding prostitutes (Bjorler and Lindberg) had made together by applying snapped-off, pencil-thin tree limbs to some unbranded, glossy white drug store stationery during a sunburnt Mardi Gras trip to an abandoned all-Black cemetery in the Katrina-ravaged, never rebuilt projects where a poison ivy-covered archway entrance is all that’s left to discourage looters, vandals and one of the four boys who wandered off on his own then decided to defile the cracked, unequally split jaws of a nude, heavily eroded, gray-green, eternally screaming gargoyle statue.

Grade: A