Review by Ben for At the Gates - Terminal Spirit Disease (1994)

Great new direction let down by trying to make an album out of what is really an EP.

Finally At the Gates got their structure right with Terminal Spirit Disease. Their first two albums The Red in the Sky is Ours and With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness, while seemingly both having numerous fans, lacked any sort of cohesive song writing. I find both to be quite frustrating to endure due to good riffs appearing and disappearing before you've had any chance to enjoy them. It's difficult to find anything truly memorable on them as there's a million ideas combined in one chaotic tapestry. On this album (if you can call it that), they streamlined things and created real "songs" for the first time in their existence, and for the first time I find myself enjoying their work immensely.

The first two tracks, The Swarm and Terminal Spirit Disease are awesome. Both contain truly great riffs that display the sort of quality that these Swedish legends would produce in force on their future classic Slaughter of the Soul. And the World Returned is a nice acoustic instrumental to break things up and the remaining three studio tracks are all great if not quite up to the standard that of the earlier part of the album set. Unfortunately, that's all we really get as the last three tracks are live versions of older material that for the most part, I didn't really get into the first time around. The production is decent enough for these live recordings with all instruments easily heard and the band putting in a powerful performance.

All Life Ends is easily the best of these tracks which was first released on their rather less melodic 1991 EP Gardens of Grief. But The Burning Darkness and Kingdom Gone do no more for me here than they did on the studio albums, making Terminal Spirit Disease fade away disappointingly after a promising start. The new material would probably be worth around 4.5 stars, but I must shed half a star for not completing what they started. Still, if you enjoy Slaughter of the Soul, then there's a lot to like about this release. But it's a long distant second to that classic, that's for sure.