Released on: 23rd February 2018
What happened to Night in Gales since 2011. Did they break a mirror? According to my highly revered and critically acclaimed source (Enclyopedia Metallum) Björn Gooßes officially left the group in 2012. Okay so that’s one year. We’re six years after that event and Night in Gales have released a new album called The Last Sunsets; plural because one is never enough.
It gets off to a great start. The guitar tone is on point. Rough yet refined while dirty but cogent. It’s a mighty meaty monument to the magic that good sound production can do for your sound. It’s an absolute pleasure to behold and yet it’s only half the battle. The riffs have got aural geometry to cover and this album like almost every other has highs and lows, and they call it melody.
The Last Sunsets are filled with melodies, which for better or worse wouldn’t be too out of place in a post-hardcore setting. Melo-death it is though and it doesn’t deviate from that. It’s reminiscent of the mighty At The Gates’ Slaughter of the Soul album, which is a timeless classic, but seems like an ersatz after thought in context to The Last Sunsets, especially when it’s spliced with the rhythm of Hypocrisy. In summary this album sounds like the defective clone baby of At The Gates and Hypocrisys which is pretty awesome infact.
There’s something to be said for trans-mutational melo-death metal and that is that it means business. Night in Gales depict this by showing that aggression can be utilized with intelligent design to create a harmonic simulacra of metals’ leviathan releases. Having been together since 1995 this latest album sounds like a roots album. A styled retrospective of what brought the band together. It’s a ready sounding album that comes from good stock.
7/10
