Gates to the Morning

With Return To Earth, Gates to the Morning releases its debut album

Gates to the Morning is a band project that originated in the bedroom of Sean Meyers. With the debut album, Return To Earth, Meyers now set sail for the whole wide world with a wide range of styles in his backpack. He started out as a jazz musician - his influences range from Art Blakey to bands like Opeth and Tool - and he labels the music of Gates to the Morning as Post Black Metal. Return To Earth is an invitation, especially for those listeners who want their music spiced with strong theatrical and storytelling elements. A listener, with a predeliction for concept albums, that likes to take, in the etheral atmospheres of a panoramic musical landscape, a mind trip. On Return to Earth you can hear the love for fantasy, for Tolkien, the love for grand gestures. Return to Earth takes one on a journey of life; an encounter with many challenges, inevitable disappointments and victories. A musical journey, Mahlerian in ambition, that eventually leads to self-realization and enlightenment.
 
For what the genre-name Post Black Metal is worth: Return To Earth is a record that surely will appeal to the lover of symphonic rock. The album provides mood-creating soundscapes that are broken open by changes in tempo and atmosphere. A carefully prepared musical meal, a skillfully built theater of kaleidoscopic sounds in which Sean Meyers gets help from studio engineer Kevin Antreassian (The Dillinger Escape Plan). Return to Earth is an exciting musical enterprise that doesn’t go where nobody went before but where its creator succeeds in making his personal and musical interests and preoccupations palpable for the listener. Towards the end of the album, that journey loses some of its momentum and its excitement. Atmosphere goes at the expense of musical substance and variety. Here some more "Art Blakey" instead of "late period-Opeth" would have kept the tension arc better. Album closer is the title track, beautifully sung by Meg Moyer, with which this journey, the accomplishment of what once started in the intimate environment of a bedroom, ends in a great and magnificent way.
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Gates to the Morning   (BanDcamp)