This release plays like an unified work with different "movements". The brief feedback laden intro to the opener, "Kha'laam", explodes into a black funeral march. The guitars and drumming alike create an atmosphere of clanging dread. Extreme music like this challenges your preconceived, and likely long held, notions of the art form's function. Mainstream voices have often told us, from our earliest days, that music works best on a single level Can you hum it? Can you dance to it? "Kha'laam" and music like it works under a different paradigm. It is compellingly theatrical and entertaining on that level. However, it also pulls an aural blackness over the listener and forces them to confront it.
As if cycling through a larger musical structure, "Mangled Icons" stomps into the listener's consciousness immediately with charging guitars cutting through a thin haze of feedback. The effect seems to connect the song to its predecessor. The lyrical content is indecipherable to my ear, but the vocal timber and the inhuman quality in its performance is a key component of this song. The dark, glowering power and style present in the first track is here as well.
Gateway's final offering, "Vocatvs", plays like a summation of themes. The aural signatures heard in earlier songs receive an extended treatment and surprises abound. Keyboards open "Vocatvs" and a slight classical influence seems laced through their arrangement. It is not just a tribute to Van Oyen's musical ideas, but the clear production as well, that this finale sound monolithic. The song and release end with the music slowly stopping and leaving ambient sound lingering in the air.
It is rare to hear debuts so singular, so devoid of the influence plundering young artists often mistake for originality. Gateway is intent on capturing your attention and never letting it go.
Words: J.Hillenburg
Bandcamp