Style: death/black metal
Primary Emotions/Themes: when the cosmic kaos comes for you, will you be prepared or will you be swept into the antisphere?
Thoughts: What a cover. What an absolute masterwork of an album cover. It encapsulates the deep cosmic horror that the band is channeling with their music. The fear. The unknown. The absolute alien nature. The grotesque. All of it.
Gateways to the Antisphere is obviously influenced greatly by the literary works of H.P. Lovecraft. The inhuman tentacled being on the cover should have been enough evidence of that. Tracks such as "Devotion to Cosmic Chaos" and "He is the Gate" should clue anyone in doubt in to the foundation of their literary work.
The band uses this foundation to create an intense, melody infused blackened death metal album. The band is never content to rest on one riff for more than a few bars as the riffs come fast and furious. That doesn't mean that these are not cohesive songs though, on the contrary the band will often revisit the same riff but with a slightly different twist - a different tempo, or a slightly different variation. It makes what could easily be an overwhelming album a quite enjoyable one instead.
The band has always shown potential. Their debut showed flashes of what they were capable of, but it's on Gateways where they really found their sound. This would end up becoming the basis to the follow up album which perfected this style and in doing so created one of the finest extreme metal albums in the past ten years.
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