Gateway is the poundingly barbaric one-man Belgian death metal project helmed by Robin Van Oyen. Gateway’s second EP “Boundless Torture” is a four track, 22 minute long trip into the stomping, crunching, putrid mass that is Van Oyen’s work.

Boundless Torture revels in the slow-paced, caveman-like, doomy caves of the genre. Lo-fi and fuzzy all the way through, Van Oyen’s grizzly incantations are completely indecipherable and essentially serve as another instrument to be chained onto the listeners foot as they are thrown into the water and pulled through the thick sound that onslaughts them. Gateway takes a step back from it’s thudding approach in the track “Iron Storms” to replace its slow, methodic approach with one that thunders out of the gate and leaves all melody behind, chainsawing its way into the final ten minute-long track “Odyssey Of The Bereaved”. The EP finishes much in the same way that it began with a return to a long, slow, and heavy beating of hazy doom-death.

The cover art is suiting for the sound that Gateway offers, featuring a hazy medieval looking depiction of some sort of satanic on-goings. I’m not quite sure what exactly is going on in this picture, but it looks something akin to a group of villagers who have captured a few demons and one is now either dripping blood in its mouth from a stick, feeding it chicken wings from a stick, or tearing its tongue out… with a stick. Regardless it looks sick. As a side note, the logo is good too. It has that grimy feel that you expect from a death/doom/(blackened death?) band without just looking like a bundle of sticks thrown together, which looks fine in itself but is a little overdone in my humble opinion.

Boundless Torture definitely worth a try for any fan of a more doomy approach to death metal, especially if you enjoy a less polished and more fuzzy, barbaric sound. The EP has a very old school flavor to it as a whole, encompassing both the sound and the presentation of the album itself.

Release date: May 18th, 2018
Label: independent
Tracklist:
1. Boundless Torture
2. Famished Below
3. Iron Storms
4. Odyssey Of The Bereaved

Written and recorded between 2017 and 2018
Mixed and mastered at the Doomcave, Bruges
Robin Van Oyen