Portal - Swarth

October 19, 2009

Reviewer: Matt

This is the album for which all those who haven’t been sold on Portal in the past have been waiting.  Their third full length release, Swarth is a long-awaited fulfillment of Portal’s vision, a nightmare of cosmic dread transcribed into the language of twisted death metal.

Swarth sees Portal finally hitting their stride.  On previous albums Portal’s songwriting skill wasn’t sufficiently developed to realize their ambition.  Debut Seepia was fairly commonplace death metal clothed in ominous production techniques.  Their sophomore album Outre’ was an experiment in noise music, largely abandoning structure in favor of randomness and cacophony.  Both albums exhibited an over-reliance on aesthetic at the expense of coherent composition. 

But Swarth is a different beast, a unification of their death metal roots and noise soundscapes into a holistic expression of their vision, rather than a sloppy juxtaposition of diverse elements for purely aesthetic purpose.  And finally a Portal album has a production capable of appropriately rendering their compositions.  Drums are thunderous, vocals are present and not overbearing, and guitars are thick and murky.

As Gorguts did with Obscura, Portal has developed with Swarth a new vocabulary for death metal, shattering all notions of “natural” rhythmic and melodic progressions.  Riffs drop out in mid-stride, leaving uncomfortably dissonant notes resonating in their wake as if the thought was suddenly sucked into a black hole.  Brutality bursts out of nowhere, with arrhythmic cavernous vocals and indecipherable distorted riffs transmutating what is on paper a typical brutal death metal passage but in its presentation is a flood of static and noise from the netherworld.  Chord and note changes are indistinct; like a collapsing star the density is enormous, so that individual tones have no space between them but inundate the listener with pulsating waves of dissonant melody. 

Much of the fat from Outre’ has been trimmed; no longer is there disorder for its own sake.  Gone are the random, often directionless and self-indulgent forays into cacophony.  Rather, Swarth is lean and linear, attaining a clear perspective of its own internal order. 

Portal have succeeded at radically deconstructing contemporary death metal and propelling the genre into the next decade, all while maintaining an uncompromising faithfulness to its tradition.  Swarth is the most conceptually and aesthetically challenging death metal album of the year and is certain to reignite debate over this most unique act.  As a new convert I can say with confidence that this is an album all who enjoy death metal should hear, and most will rank it among the most memorable releases of the year.

Release Date: October 20th, 2009
Label: Profound Lore Records

TRACK LISTING

1.  Swarth
2.  Larvae
3.  Illoomorpheme
4.  The Swayy
5.  Writhen
6.  Omenknow
7.  Werships
8.  Marityme

Total playing time: 40:42

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