Portal - Outre
March 23 2008 at 08:41:36 PM
Attempting to chart the course of this mysterious act from their much heralded though hardly noticed debut album,
Seepia up to the present becomes a maddening pursuit on par with the curious and ultimately doomed protagonists of the group's notorious muse, H.P. Lovecraft. For Portal are an impass in themselves, who speak in portents and doggerel at once ridiculous and compulsive, forbidding their guise be penetrated beyond the mask.
The group's second album,
Outre, is the near-perfection of a style as abstract as it is biological. A monster formed of melted wax, moldy film stock and tar-painted fibers; a traveling exhibit of ectoplasmic riffs circling from the bottom up on "Abysmill" — where rhythm forms slowly and with such pervasive sonic glut that it seems to unspool inside space alien to real-time - to the "Black House's" guitars tuned to whine and wind with the force of a veritable maelstrom, only to be viciously cut short by three-ton monolithic breaks, wiry scrapes and chuffing snorts, not so much propelled as they are underlined by erratic drums that shake objects apart like an angry poltergeist. Together these eight tracks are a kind of prophetic post-millennial fulfillment of antecedent benchmark Morbid Angel, groaning out spores of dissonant, swollen chords that swirl and streak into inky, airborne omens.
But Portal confounds such comparisons with a distinct lack of hooks (or leads) throughout the album's condensed 36 minutes. Preferring instead to advance in ambient arrangements linked by foaming, static interludes. Likewise, to call it simply "Lovecraftian" ignores the ways Portal steps beyond, even perverts the master for their own purposes, distilling his creations into a pure sensation of horror. The stories written here are parallax, from Cthulu's vantage; beneath aquatic depths, murky and merciless. Scream and you will drown.
[Todd DePalma]
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