I’m going heavy today! Today’s batch of gross and stinky albums comes courtesy of Portal, Aborted, and Portal.

Wait whuuuut? Portal twice? Tom, have you been smoking the marijuana reefer cigarettes?? Have you been eating the LSD biscuits again?? MAYBE. It turns out, and this may be news to you, sometimes a band releases more than one album in a single year. Crazy, right?

Portal – AVOW
(May 28, 2021)

Portal has notoriety in extreme metal circles for being heavy. Hey, what a concept! But…yeah, they really are brutally heavy. For anyone wading through the fetid swamp of black metal, looking for the filthiest, nastiest, murkiest, most mind-twisting, obscure, and evil sounding black metal out there without stumbling upon some accidental power chords, clean guitars, or intelligible “vocals”, Portal is about as good as you’re going to do.

The key is to make the music sound mentally unstable; always on the brink of complete schizophrenia and all-encompassing enough to bring the listener entirely into their fucked-up world. More than anything, Portal plays with texture in a way that sounds like middle-era Neurosis, but a few more levels deeper in Hell. Take “Catafalque”, the 10-minute opener, where the guitars aren’t so much an musical instrument as they are a power tool. They’re revving up as if they’re vehicles endlessly shifting gears on a bleak, desolate highway. Most of the percussion happens on the cymbals and hi-hats, and they’re being brushed upon instead of hit. “Unnerving” doesn’t even begin to describe the tension. Or take “Eye”, which feels like a giant canvas stretching to infinity, with guitars scratching up the canvas while drums slowly pulse over the cacophony.

Each track is its own experience, each experience vivid enough to paint a picture in your head. Let it paint that picture, you might be surprised at what you see.

For that alone, I give this album a thumbs up. I won’t reach for this one too often, but if a band like Portal can create for me vibrant images with their music, in a vacuum, in a way that Brian Eno can’t with his ambient soundscapes, then good on Portal.

Early Verdict:

Aborted – ManiaCult
(September 10, 2021)

I’m not familiar with Belgian death metal band Aborted’s work before this, their eleventh album. Churning out LPs like clockwork since 1999, Wikipedia claims that they were “key contributors” to the brutal death metal subgenre, which combines death metal with grindcore. In essence, this is just death metal. But faster.

ManiaCult isn’t all brutality, though. Yes, yes, there’s plenty of snorty, throaty growling! But I detect two other distinct vocal styles: sneery post-hardcore yelling, and hollow, slightly echoed shouting. Trust me on this one, this is a big deal!

Not only that, but you can easily hear many different approaches to their guitar playing. Yes, yes, there’s plenty of down-tuned and distorted shredding! But they’ll also bust out punky, thrash riffs and clean, power metal chords as well!

And not only THAT, but it’s not all Speedy Gonzales tremolo picking! First of all, that’s racist! Second of all, they slow down a lot of the time and allow the riffs some room to really hit hard and hurt. Sometimes they really slow down. “Verbolgen” is a 1:38 instrumental interlude of cautious piano, etherial tape hiss, and some subtle electronic effects, right in the middle of the record. It sounds like you’re walking carefully along an empty, dimly lit corridor, chest pounding, taking a breather, and then you peak around the corner and see the next onslaught waiting.

All this seamless transitioning from the slow and flighty to the fast and chaotic, the palette of vocal and instrumental colors, the little nuances and tricks, it’s fucking engaging. And at 41 minutes, it doesn’t last long enough to wear out its welcome.

10 other studio albums in the last 22 years. I’m going to enjoy this.

Early Verdict:

Portal – Hagbulbia
(May 28, 2021)

Awww HELL naw! Why? Why release this one? What was the point?

Yes, Portal released two albums on the same day this year. While AVOW is a very reasonable contribution to their discographical canon, Hagbulbia, which can be considered as AVOW‘s companion piece, is a complete mess of shit. And, usually, I consider that a compliment with respect to black metal. In fact, I was gearing up to love this album after learning that it was critically panned by most extreme metal music publications. Nothing like a completely negative consensus across the board to get me all fired up! Metal Machine Music? I’ll spin that all day!

OK, not really, but Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music isn’t a far-off comparison to Hagbulbia. Luckily, the latter is only about 38 minutes long, but it lasts an eternity anyway. It’s all just muddled noise, presenting the most putrid, unappealing permutation of the band that is fathomable. AVOW at least had some discernable texture. Completely incomprehensible vocals overlap dozens of times over into a giant, dense slab of concrete squalor that mirrors the kind stuff that you’d get from a typical Merzbow record.

Sometimes it’s interesting if you really, really try. I’m not masochistic enough to listen to this more than twice. Portal needed to get this out of their system. I’m glad they did, and now they can move on. No vivid imagery from me here. It’s just dust.

Early Verdict: