Let’s get a few things straight before we go into this. If you came here looking for rational, linear song structure, get the fuck out. If you came here for moshable groove, get the fuck out. If you came here for technical but ubiquitous musical compositions, get the fuck out. If you came in here for any sane reason, GET THE FUCK OUT.

Portal isn’t about sounding like an old school death metal clone. They’re not about replicating Necrophagist or Suffocation worship acts. They’re not about overly technical but sterile musicianship nor are they about easy-to-grasp, simple rhythms. Sure, the experienced death metal enthusiast can spot a few individual elements that echo back to the  golden days of Morbid Angel, Gorguts, and early Incantation within the haunted halls of Portal’s nightmarish cacophony, but the total picture of this grotesque caricature of metal is more like what would happen if Goblin became a death/black metal when they decided to write the soundtrack to Suspiria while doing a fuckload of gnarly hallucinogens. Portal plays the world’s most inaccessible, convoluted, bizarre, and horrific death metal whose sole purpose is to drag you kicking and screaming through a purgatory full of the wallowing souls of Holocaust victims, eternally screeching and feasting off the flesh of their late Nazi captors who are condemned to be everlastingly devoured with no satiation in sight. Portal is the stuff Ted Haggard screams out at night in hot sweats when he awakes from his slumber, realizing there is no God but only oblivion.

On this third full length effort Swarth, the guitars wail and drone, convulse and sway, encircling and wrapping around each other like a boa constricting its prey. The riffs don’t move in any fashion resembling an attempt to create pleasant groove or hooks, but are more crafted to make the listener increasingly unsettled and disturbed. At times they purposely try to give birth to a murky atmosphere with every intent on sounding alien to the listener’s sense of musical harmony. The drumming is increasingly ominous, utilizing everything from martial rhythm to chaotic rumbling. The percussion always sounds like the distant war chant of the the creatures from William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland, pounding in the background as they grow closer and closer to their ever-so-mortal victim.

And The Curator’s vocal performance is as nether-worldly as ever. He doesn’t so much scream or yell, much less guttural growl; no, The Curator uses a vocal technique that sounds more like the dying emissions of a possessed Cossack, speaking in damnable glossolalia that neither resembles words nor gibberish but some unholy, eldritch language from before time immemorial.

To be critical, though, if you’ve heard Portal before you already kinda had an idea how Swarth would play out. But like Immolation, Portal manages to maintain that lofty, yet bizarrely unmatched standard of quality. While there are now bands slowly coming close to what Portal has to offer (such as Mitochondrion), Portal is still very much a within a league of its own. If you can swallow what it throws at you, you’re in for one of the best releases of 2009, alongside Teitanblood and Ulcerate.

Review byNecro-tron