Top 15! Woohoo!
We've now reached an album which I named the second best album of 2009 last December. The piece I wrote for it was fucking good so here it is again:
True evil always lurks where you wouldn't expect it.
This is why crossburning corpsepaint posers who name their bands "Christfucker" and talk about how amazing Satan is offer little but hollow provocations. This is why the most evil people, the ones will ultimately destroy the world as we know it aren't devilworhippers with guitars, but rather innocuous-looking old white guys in fantastic suits.
This is why the world's most revered horror fiction writer looks like an accountant and why the most feared terrorist in history looks gentler than a garden gnome.
Fuck, there I go rambling again.
What I'm trying to get to is that this is also why the most nightmarish soul-rape of a record released this year comes from the land of koalas, from a group of people who call themselves Portal (a name so mundane you don't stop to think just how sinister it really is) and wear grandfather clocks on their heads.
No traditional song structures to speak of, just continuous eruptions of black slime from the darkest corners of the underworld. Imagine Evoken playing Deathspell Omega covers in Arkham Asylum and you're halfway there. Had black metal existed in 1925 it would have sounded like this. Lovecraft's ancient, slithering tentacles set to music.
Portal aren't the fastest, the heaviest or the most technical, but what they do have in spades is the Feel. Yes, with a capital F. That feel of nihilism and utter despair that so many bands, particularly in black metal, try to achieve. The feel of lurking chaos, inescapable terrors and a suffocating descent into a madness darker than the deepest chasm.
You dont believe me? Try listening to Swarth with headpones in the dark all by yourself and the volume cranked all the way up. It's the closest thing possible to a waking nightmare, one of the most terrifying, claustrophobic musical experiences you will ever have. You can psysically feel it slowly engulfing your soul, one track at a time.
A landmark record.
(mp3) Portal - Swarth
(mp3) Portal - Larvae
Buy it @ Amazon.com
2 comments:
This was my favorite post from that 2009 series, great job!
btw new CROWN album is a grower (like all their stuff for me) and I'll call it on par with Possessed 13, just with less melody and more hammering. I am headbanging with tears of joy. Is it possible they have crazier drumming this time out? Yes, it is. Someone out there loves me.
Not many bands put out 4 DM albums in a row that kick so much ass, or come back from hiatus like nothing happened. I gotta think seriously about putting these guys in "the pantheon" at this point.
Now we're talking! \m/
One of the spookiest album in the history of Runkkind.
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