Portal– Vexovoid (Profound Lore Records)
There are artists whose aesthetic decisions make certain terminology difficult to resist when describing their music. The output of Australian metal band Portal, for instance, can consistently be seen as nightmarish, and not only for the sinister quality of the music. Their visual element, constumes crafted from repurposed objects – clocks, tree branches, a smattering of garb that's quasi-religious in appearance – recasts these items in a fashion not unlike the manner in which the subconscious can render malleable images and ideas kicking around the back of the mind, turning the familiar into the menacing. Similarly, their music, though ostensibly death metal, takes many of that genre's signifiers and reimagines them, producing an end result that's easily one of the strangest and most unsettling products of the genre as a whole.
Vexovoid, Portal's fourth full-length, does little to alter the aesthetic that the band has refined over the past two decades. The music possesses little of the visceral appeal that metal tends to emphasize, instead relying on masses of atonal sonic clusters, which swarm around percussive elements that alternate between fast blasting and slow dirge seemingly at random – to say nothing of the occasional passages that forgo percussion altogether. These latter moments illustrate that, if not for the growled death metal vocals, the music would have as much in common with the turbulent, cascading waves of dissonance that characterized Glenn Branca's early guitar symphonies as they would any other metal band. But unlike some of the more studied, calculated attempts to incorporate avant-garde composition into metal (Liturgy for example), there's something more primal and mysterious to Portal.
Though their core concepts have become familiar, at least to those who have heard the albums, Portal's existence seems to have been predicated on obscuring as much of their approach as possible. This manifests itself in some fairly obvious ways – the cloaking of their physical appearance and their insistence on a level of atonality that can easily prove too harsh for even a seasoned death metal fan – but also permeates other facets, from the members' stage names (Horror Illogium and Ignis Fatuus, for instance) to song titles like “Orbmorphia” and “Oblotten,” weird, viscous sounding neologisms (which could almost pass for antiquated medical terminology) that do little to illuminate any cogent, easily comprehensible worldview. On the other hand, Vexovoid does incorporate fleeting moments that break up the din – the discordant strums in the midsection of “Arwyeon,” the stark Swans-style dirge that opens “Curtain,” or the textural noise elements that conclude “Plasm” all come to mind – passages that, though they don't render the music any more accessible than any of Portal's other albums, at least offer some contrast, however brief.
Though Vexovoid only occasionally veers from the path Portal has been forging for years now, it's another successful entry into the band's oeuvre because of its ability to adhere to the self-contained orthodoxy they have created for themselves by subverting expectations of what a metal band is capable of. The genre has had no lack of harsh music or weird stage outfits, and Portal's ability to remain both disturbing and compelling despite their proximity to such tropes is a testament to both their creativity and their non-conformity. It's rare to be able to say it, but there is nothing out there that sounds quite like Portal. While that alone will probably render their work inaccessible to most, it is the one thing above all else that has ensured, and will continue to ensure, their longevity.