The cover art – taken from a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, apparently – pulled me in. I am a sucker for the peasant art. But it was really the starkness of the black and white painting and the sinew in the green mossy border that caught my eye initially. Almost like a stereoscope View-Master. And this painting by Bruegel is the reel. If only it were all so innocent.
Thick with atmosphere, piercing riffs, and punishing drums, “The Coexistence of Dismal Entities” is a Mid-Atlantic summer afternoon, excessive humidity and all. The atmosphere alone is inviting, but it’s those bells and whistles—the piercing riffs, punishing drums, cavernous vocals—that’ll bowl you over, if the opening “blechhhh” doesn’t get you first.
Coffins and Eternal Rot aren’t bad or wholly inaccurate frames of reference here. But they are imperfect. Coffins maintains a similar focus on riffs. Eternal Rot rides a similar wave of ambience. Yet there’s something uniquely addicting and just a tad surprising in Gateway’s sound. “Sacrificial Blood Oath in the Temple of K’zadu has whatever that superb synth(?) sound thing is about two minutes in. “Scourged at Dawn” has that almost psychedelic riff at about the 0:45-second mark. “Bog Bodies Near the Humid Crypt” is as delightfully suffocating as the name suggests. And darn near danceable about three minutes in. Finally, album closer “Duvelsput” would be almost overwhelmingly cacophonous if it weren’t for the sprinkle of melody in the funeral doom dirge.
Admittedly, being flatlined by a doom/death album wasn’t on my Bingo card this year. I am just about doom/deathed out. No idea why. Just one of those things. That Galgendood caught me at that inopportune moment and still struck me the way it did seems even more impressive.
