SHORT BUT SWEET: GATEWAY — “BOUNDLESS TORTURE”

Within the more heartless and slaughtering corners of the extreme metal underground there has been a decades-long competition to reach the deepest, coldest caverns of devastation and despair, and to weaponize the horrors found within the crushing pressures of those abyssal chasms. The Belgian one-man death/doom band Gateway has been one of the more dedicated and successful combatants in that race to the bottom. Boundless Torture is Gateway’s latest offering, an EP that’s being digitally released today.

This is terrifying titanism, of the kind that spawns a reflexive cascade of metaphors from the more emotional and less analytical reviewers out there, such as yours truly. The sound is immense, dense, abrasive, blood-congealing, and (perhaps perversely) electrifying.

There are rhythms within these enormous roaring storms of sound, but they are mainly slow, the riffs and the snare reverberations resembling the lumbering strides and long staggering lurches of a leviathan. Twisted, spectral guitar vibrations wail and gleam through these unearthly movements, and the horrific vocals — which range in their ghastliness from abyssal roars to tormented shrieks, and other forms of skin-shivering torture in between — make the experience even more unnerving

It’s not until you reach the short third track (“Iron Storms”) that the snare work becomes more frenzied, surrounded by an overpowering hurricane of sound. The long closing track, “Odyssey of the Bereaved”, is the most dynamic of the four pieces, moving back to the massive, crawling and clawing riffs at first, but then incorporating bursts of mind-plundering pile-driving, and megaton detonations. The lead guitar goes off like a wailing siren. The song makes the listener’s head want to move, the eyes to roll back in the head, the skin to shiver as if exposed naked to sub-zero conditions.

This is the kind of music that’s well-suited to the length of an EP. It makes for a riveting 22-minute trip. More wouldn’t be unwelcome, but it would certainly be more hazardous to your sanity.

Boundless Torture is digitally available now through Bandcamp, alongside pre-orders of a limited T-shirt run. A CD version is expected from Pulverised Records

Bandcamp:
https://gatewaydeathdoom.bandcamp.com/album/boundless-torture

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/gatewaydeathdoom