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Portal: Swarth

19/05/10 || Khlysty

Hi, there, you guys. Yes, it’s that time, again. It’s time to re-enter Portal’s wonderful and illustrious world of gentle sounds and soul-uplifting lyricism and inventive production values. So, please, take your Dramamine and hold on, it’s gonna be a trip of a lifetime.

After establishing themselves as masters of all that’s sick and twisted in death metal (with two exceedingly bizarre but brilliantly composed and executed exercises in nausea-inducing slabs of mondo-bizarro death metal, “Seepia” and “Outré”), our happy lads from the Land Down Under return with a record that seems to be a culmination of everything they have tried in the past, with some more elements thrown in for good measure.

If you’ve already read the praises I rained “Outré” with, or if you have any experience with the band, you know what to expect by now: sick, ever-changing, hallucinogenic riffs, based on almost-atonality and discordance, tempo and time-signature changes that seem almost random, a dirty, hyper-distorted guitar-bass sound, and some, let’s say, “idiosyncratic” production choices that make everything sound as ugly, otherwordly (in the word’s more negative sense) and user-unfriendly as humanly possible.

This time around, though, our boys seem to up the ante in the craziness department, adding a strange, gurgle-like quality to the guitar production, that makes them sound as if some infernal clanging device is working underwater. The Curator’s vocals also seem even more deep and “way out there, dude” that in “Outré”, making his unintelligible growls and howls sound even more like some Lovecraftian incantation towards rising some Great Old One from his death-like slumber.

At the same time, though –and I know that I’m putting any cred that I might have with GD readers on the line here-, I think that Portal, this time around, tried to put some kind of groove (yeah, yeah, I know how this sounds…) into the dementia that they call songs. Of course, with the term “groove” I don’t mean that they sound like, say, Obituary, but that they try to have some more repetition, some more discernible riffing, even some, god help us, “melody” to the songs. Some kind of “hooks” frome which the listener might cling amidst the general paranoia and chaos that characterizes Portal’s music.

Please, understand, though, that this is still Portal. Its’ still more impenetrable, sea-sickness-inducing, dirty and ugly than the great majority of death metal produced today. Their music is almost an abstraction of what death metal’s supposed to be and that’s what makes them stand out from the pack. Bottom line is that, while still deeply entrenched into music’s most unapproachable facets, Portal have created in “Swarth” an exceptional record, up there with the best of ‘em and, at the same time, added enough juttings from which the listener can hold on amidst the maelstrom.

Look, if you like your death metal brutal, unrelenting and downright scary and, at the same time, inventive, fulla smarts and creative, Portal is one of ‘em bands that you cannot ignore and “Swarth” is a record that you’ll come back to, each time with the same mixture of awe and repulsion. If that ain’t a feat, then I don’t know what is…

8,5

Information
Released: 2009
Label: Profound Lore
Website: www.portalabode.com
Band
The Curator: vocals
Horror Illogium: guitar
Aphotic Mote: guitar
Omenous Fugue: bass
Ignis Fatuus: drums

Tracklist
01. Swarth
02. Larvae
03. Illoomorpheme
04. The swayy
05. Writhen
06. Omenknow
07. Werships
08. Marityme

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