Roly Porter
Aftertime

It took me a while to digest this album by Roly Porter, which, at a first superficial listen, I had labeled as an "imitator" of Ben Frost and that icy gem "By the Throat". But it was just a fleeting moment, enough time to digest "Tleilax" and realize that "Aftertime", while moving on the same coordinates of a dark and icy ambient-drone, makes the more mechanical, metallic, sonic component, I would say, its distinctive character.

The album is a tangle of inhuman sounds, like those of "Corrin" and its drones that mercilessly hunt you down, Ben Frost's Killshot where wolves have been turned into amorphous metal monsters ready to tear you apart at the first misstep. A real joy for the ears. The atmosphere that emanates from each piece is that of a dark crystal hell, where all hope is in vain. And Porter is keen to remind us constantly by hammering our frontal lobes with the drills of "Hessra". Surely this Aftertime is not an album for everyone, obsessive, noisy, disharmonic and deafening. But with its own coherence and beauty that, if you survive the fierce assaults with which it tries to take you down, it knows how to seduce. A sick, masochistic seduction, but capable of generating pleasure.

Recommended in these icy winter nights, surrounded as we are by metal monsters and steel cages, what better scenario for this album? Ah, for those who didn't know, Roly Porter is one of the two souls behind the project Vex’d.