Portal
Swarth

Attila the Hun in a season in hell.

I never thought I would experience such masochistic and vaguely anal pleasure, centuries after the decline of metal acne, wandering around, vampiric and excited like a sniper who has just lined up the enemy's head, bent over these grooves, in search of a victim.

So it is. 

An adulterated version of the Ophite serpent (perhaps Chinese, perhaps belonging to Von Teppesh himself) has hidden in a showground in the Australian desert, where wandering sons of Odin have fed it fresh blood and biblical entheogens, educating it to evangelize the bush for the baptism of the new black-doom-grind-harsh-brutal-freakedelica dawn.  

I’m no expert, but this 12’ from Australian band Portal is the fatal howl, thrown into the foulest of night sewers, among the carcasses of "former" Nordic metal and the repugnant exhibition of poor skulls, depending on tastes, of a Mayhem-loving of hashish using its shining boreal sword to slash our pitiful ears with the plague of animalistic screams, and poor Burzum, aged, stillborn, and resurrected such that I cannot accept that someone, somewhere, still needs to pay for him.  

But here we are on another planet, friends. This is an indecent anthem to murder, perpetually in the grip of a cocktail of Rizen and Cool Drink of Water Blues played at +40 pitch for the dear guests of the humid cells of Guantanamo Bay.  

As always, the Ugolini of Profound Lore, (people known for wearing animal skins and girding their heads with the teeth of enemies), offer us desired torment (the revenge of heavy metal??), releasing this magnificent (again, depending on tastes) series of disasters brutally “Profound”, practically a dictionary with entries like “Vlachian grind”, “industrial song-like metallurgy” and “human hamburgers with asbestos and Tolkien shards”.  

Folks, this is the life sentence imposed on Matthew Bower, who, fugitive and prescribed, has benefited from the extinction of all processes against him for sonic crimes committed under the influence of rock hard, stubbornness, and hypertrophic volume and consequently has been able to send unequivocal Morse signals from exile in the Skullflower landfill, the only possible benchmark (among millions of divergences).

Here is the aesthetics (and why not the ethics) of metal, but without the Nazi, Satanist and, if you will, onanist rhetoric of the Nordic masters.  

Above all reigns the same malevolent guitar work, husky and industrial like a Lunz record in the penal colony of Bergen, or rather an experimental hypothesis of drifting brutal core, but then foreign, sneering, and toxic things come crashing in, within the canon but beyond the already heard, and the oozing eardrums heal, surprised and fooled: drones? Deathly percussion? Freak metal? Psychbrutal? The miracle autoreverse of a beastly god?.  

Water. Where the rhythm section, (one of the worst ever heard), sprays frenzied Para Bellum bursts, rising and falling in fecal splatter-core intestines, the "vocals" deliver curses inflicted with fierce cloistered discipline through a nail tube, as the result of a savage copulation between man and beast that growls like a Finnish watermelon vendor in a doom withdrawal crisis.  

Clearly, this is lucid foreshadowing of the future, behind which, whether it is governed by a marketing idea (I don't think so), or it is pure "blind determination", there is the damned rage of those who want to leave a nice scar, at least to those who can receive the blows, in this new dawn of the living dead, dear Burzum.

Just as often happens to the lucky and the brave who boast of having sifted through the crap and found a beautiful diamond, beneath the superficial confusion of vulgarity and gratuitous massacre, emerges - albeit with difficulty - wickedness made to pulverize the Gorgoroth, hypothesizing a canned version to feed to hungry puppies of the remorseful Hitlerjugend for the tortures practiced on the youth of the world. However, this record is completely devoid of that ideology, those subliminal messages, cryptosignals, and incitements that have, by now, left only the dusty paper of history books to that glorious season of "music".  

Oh yes, you can feel all the time that has passed since the apocryphal cult of “Dawn of the Black Hearts”, and then tell me if the new brutal, free of curses on Christ himself or praises to Mammon, does not reside in the lush Austral continent, or if the most plausible of the Mayan apocalyptic geometries is not here, ground like human meat by these Australian-Celtic axemen in heat, bastard sons of those who broke the loins of Roman Caesar-Augustan snobbery at sunset, in the slaughterhouse of Alesia, a few years before the famous coming.

Cannibalistic to the point that I don’t understand such blind and raw persistence that it's hard to approach without a nice can of paralyzing gas.

A record to be seriously feared.