10 years after the disband, AT THE GATES found the perfect time to reunite in order to offer us the first and the last show in Athens, Greece. That Sunday the street outside the venue was full of metalheads waiting to enter the building and listen to their Swedish Death Metal for the first and last time on the stage of the club Gagarin205.
The show started with the German act THE OCEAN, who have already visited Athens not so long ago. The guys from Berlin created an audiovisual show, playing compositions from their latest release, Precambrian as well as from previous albums, while giving us industrial and vintage images by projecting video excerpts.
THE OCEAN are a -hard to follow- act for the people who are not fans of the experimental and complex music they produce. After a while the crowd started participating in the band�s elaborate trance. Though the right speaker was not working properly, resulting in the fluctuation of the sound, the atmospheric and chaotic moments of their music were not ruined and the band's performance was just excellent. The overall feeling I got from THE OCEAN's performance was total satisfaction. The band was synchronized and united performing flawlessly their arrhythmic compositions and spreading their expansive sound professionally and really well tied together on stage despite the sound problems.
After the substantial appearance of THE OCEAN, came the time that everybody has been waiting for. The crowd started squeezing to reach as close as possible to the stage and when the Swedish monsters came out everybody started to scream. After the intro AT THE GATES started the show with Slaughter of the Soul and started the music massacre! Before the fans were able to catch their breath came another song from the Slaughter of the Soul album entitled Cold. The mosh-pit got even more smashing and the walloping continued.
Tomas Lindberg is the living proof that some bands are even better live. His vocals as well as his performance were great! The vocals were flawless and he had a perfect rendition. He was pretty active going around the stage and frequently thanked the fans for remembering the band after all these years of absence. The Bjorler brothers and Martin Larsson were fiery on stage and gave their best in every song while perfectly reproducing all the hard AT THE GATES guitar and bass lines. No need to say that the drum machine called Andrian Erlandsson totally destroyed the drum set.
Too bad they played only two songs from With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness, but when the first tunes of Raped By The Light Of Christ were heard the satisfaction was quite enough.
The sound problems still remained as one speaker was functioning from time to time and wouldn't let me hear clearly the guitars, but the band's performance compensated me more than I would imagine.
Watching AT THE GATES live was a dream that I never thought would come true and especially after they declared that this was their funeral concert. The lucky ones who were at Gagarin 205 that night witnessed a legendary live in this farewell call of the Swedish monsters.
Setlist:
01. Slaughter Of The Soul
02. Cold
03. Terminal Spirit Disease
04. Raped By The Light Of Christ
05. Under A Serpent Sun
06. Windows
07. World Of Lies
08. Into The Dead Sky
09. Suicide Nation
10. The Burning Darkness
11. The Swarm
12. Neverwhere
13. Nausea
14. Forever Blind
15. Unto Others
16. The Beautiful Wound
17. All Life Ends
18. Need
19. Blinded By Fear
20. Kingdom Gone
21. The Flames Of The End
