Gates Open – Black Clouds Over the World

Band: Gates Open
Title: Black Clouds Over the World
Label: Inverse Records
Release date:  October  4th,  2024
Country: Finland
Format reviewed: High-Quality Digital Recording 

“Black Clouds Over the World” is the new EP released by Gates Open, a Finnish duo that plays Blackened Death/Thrash Metal. They released this past February their debut album, “Voice After Silence”, and after a few months they are back on track.

The two musicians behind this band are:
Jere Neejärvi – guitars, bass drums
Tommi Manninen – vocals

This album is full of energy, and it has a good balance between dark and aggressive riffs, and some melodic content. The opener “Nightmares Coming True” flirts with a bit of a sinister sound, and it’s a song that has become my favorite from this EP. The guitar work is amazing with all those  low tuned chugging riffs, the bass sounds deep and clearly audible, and vocals are raw, tortured, ultra dark. Drums also do a great work, I love the pace, the consistency they imprint to this track in particular. 

This is not an album with a lot of guitar leads, but the riffs are very good and the harmonies tend to imprint a bit of an ominous effect to the music. This, and the vocals too: there’s a rotten throat articulating some of the words. Other times, it seems as if the voice was coming from a beast crawling from the tombs to walk on Earth like a messiah of the underworld.

“Gates of North” is specially dynamic, this is a catchy song and drums have a great role as they provide a big amount of groovy patterns, besides the guitars as usual playing dark riffs and tunes. This is a song inciting more active movements, not only headbanging but also shaking the whole body. Ah at least this happens to me everytime I listen to this track.

The cover of the album speaks for itself: it’s an apocalyptic image, a figure with a black hood and cape standing on the top of a hill looking at a village covered by black and menacing clouds… hence the name of the album. I wonder if the black figure is Death, or the representation of some plague ready to devastate the Earth… It’s a powerful image and totally represents the music.

This is a very good album with a dark and sinister tone, I recommend you not to skip it! 7,5/10 by Sílvia

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7,5/10  Victory is possible
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