Review: At the Gates - Slaughter of the Soul (FDR)

Reviewing an album which came out in 95 may not be the best choice. There are hundreds of reviews already available and there is not much left to say about the music. Slaughter of the Soul is a true classic and a masterpiece of early Gothenburg sound. So why review this then? It's a reissue. And reissues, especially of older albums, tend to vary a lot in terms of sound quality. Reissues are sometimes rushed and use the CD master or even worse: lower quality MP3s. I have bought a bunch of bad reissues in the past with bad sound quality, warped records, badly cut spindles so I did a little research before buying this record.

Quick Facts: 

• Artist: At the Gates
• Album: Slaughter of the Soul
• Version: LP, black  - Discogs Link
• Label: Earache
• Found at: nuclearblast.de

This version is a great example why researching what you are buying will net you a great record. Had I found this version in a record store, I'd probably passed on it. There is only little information on the sleeve indicating that this a reissue. The only hint is the little 2014 in the bottom left corner on the back of the sleeve. I did a little research and according to discogs this is a full dynamic range, remastered, initially limited heavyweight black vinyl version of Slaughter of the Soul. This is mentioned nowhere on the whole record. So in the store would have passed on a potentially great record. Earache is well known for their FDR releases of classic albums in the past and they are well perceived.  Earache released a bunch of FDR CD reissues in the past and the consensus seems to be that the differences to the original pressings are big. Nearly all reviews I read praised the sound quality. On vinyl the differences are subtle as most of the original releases already had a very high sound quality. So upgrading to a FDR vinyl is not essential. If you want to read a bit about FDR and/or audiophile metal I strongly recommend the awesome page Metal-Fi (Link to their FDR rating system).

The origin of FDR is something you might have heard of before. The so called loudness-war which is the tendency of increased audio levels on records since the 90's. You can read about it on wikipedia but I strongly suggest the website of mastering engineer Ian Shepherd (dynamicrangeday.co.uk) for great example videos on why FDR is important in the music industry.

One of the main problems is, that FDR is no guarantee for high quality sound. There are many praised FDR reissues and many who sound nearly the same or even worse than the original release. Fortunately due to the awesome website http://dr.loudness-war.info/ you can finde a huge FDR album database online where you can check the Dynamic Range of records. Furthermore you can download a measuring tool and upload new albums to the database.

Fortunately this Slaughter of the Soul vinyl version was already included in the database (link). Compared to the three CDs already in the database the DR rating is way higher and it even beats the losless download version (although by a small margin). The release is not outstanding in terms DR but still sounds very good. I hope someone can upload the score for the other vinyl releases of this album. For my personal test I played the record against high quality streaming on spotify, the 2002 reissue on cd  and losless .flac from earaches bandcamp page. While the quality of the vinyl record was better on low, moderate and loud volume settings compared to the CD and the spotify stream, there was no audible difference compared to losless.

Quality:
I am not going to review the music as you can find hundreds of reviews out there but I am still interested in the quality of the material. This reissue comes in cardboard sleeve wich is a vinyl version of the CD front and back. The cardboard sleeve is okay, the quality is not exceptional and not bad. This definitely feels like a 90's vinyl version. Included is a printed inner sleeve with the lyrics on one side and thank you notes on the other side. The record itself is plain black heavyweight vinyl. The sticker resembles the CD with some writing added (source).

Conclusion:

This version is definitely an upgrade of the CD version of Slaughter of the Soul but might not beat the original vinyl and losless download versions. As it comes pretty cheap it is still a nice pickup for any heavy vinyl collection. If you care for music quality make sure to do some research as FDR does not mean you get the best version available.

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