It was quite a shift in pace, going from Denmark’s Rock/metal act Pretty Maids to Sweden’s melodeath act At The Gates. But isn’t that the beauty of a festival? You get a little bit of everything to fill up your recommended daily metal intake.

At The Gates went straight for the throat as they took the stage and kicked the show off with their still new opener from the At War With Reality album, Death And The Labyrinth.
The songs this day were mostly taken from this album, and the 1995 effort Slaughter Of The Soul, with only short excursions outside of these two albums to older material. No one seemed to have a problem with this though, as the crowd got well into everything the band served up.

The performance as such was good and energetic, but lacked something to make it stand out from the crowd of other good shows. Everyone played well and headbanged a lot, but apart from Tomas ‘Tompa’ Lindberg reminiscing shortly about the band’s last visit to Denmark, at the Aalborg Metal Festival, and his voting on whether he should speak English or Swedish (Swedish won a landslide victory, not surprisingly), there really wasn’t much to make this different than so many other concerts.

The crowd wasn’t overwhelming to begin with either, but more people quickly filled the gaps in front of the Hades stage, and soon enough we saw some action going on as well with a nice little moshpit in the middle. Apart from that, the audience was actually quite calm though. Appreciative of the band, no doubt about that, but content in letting the appreciation be known by shouts between songs, instead of getting physical during them.

At the end of the day, At The Gates played a solid, albeit a bit run of the mill, concert at Copenhell. It was fun while it lasted, but as quickly forgotten as the money you spent on that last beer the day before.

Setlist (incomplete):

Death And The Labyrinth
Slaughter Of The Soul
The Circular Drain