GATHERING The, A Sound Relief 2-DVD

There's a specific kind of doom that doesn't crush you, it just opens up underneath you slowly, and The Gathering spent most of the nineties perfecting it.

By the time A Sound Relief was filmed in 2005, Anneke van Giersbergen had already reshaped what a front person in atmospheric metal could sound like, and this live document catches the band in full command of that sound, the dense, hypnotic, grief-adjacent music they built from their early death metal roots into something genuinely singular. If you got here via Lacuna Coil or Katatonia and haven't gone back to find where some of that atmosphere came from, this is the correction. Two discs of live concert footage from one of the Netherlands' most important exports in the genre.

2-DVD set. Live concert release. Country of origin: Netherlands.

Fans of: Lacuna Coil, Katatonia, Anathema, Portishead