Portal and H.P. Lovecraft

"What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I would tiptoe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs." 

-from "The Music of Erich Zann", by Howard Phillips Lovecraft

The massive influence of H.P. Lovecraft on heavy metal as a whole is undeniable. To enumerate the number of metal groups that have hearkened to his mastery of cosmic horror as a source of inspiration is an exercise in futility, for there exist hundreds (if not thousands) of such examples. However, while the vast majority of these aforementioned examples utilize Lovecraft's poetry and prose as a mere grab-bag for interesting lyrical fodder or surface aesthetic considerations, no band has fully embodied his work like Portal has with their own inexplicable synthesis of death metal's virility and black metal's immersive aural textures. The totality of this thesis may be adequately summarized by two main points, which are as follows:

i.) One hallmark of Lovecraft's work is the utterly visceral nature of the text that the reader quite literally feels when reading Lovecraft at his finest (At the Mountains of Madness, "The Colour Out of Space", "The Music of Erich Zann", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", etc.), which is largely due to his surgical control of descriptive language; Portal does precisely the same thing with their convoluted albeit effective diction.

ii.) Much like music, the essence of fine literature almost exclusively hinges on the quality of the structural framework of the piece at hand. The psychology imposed on readers entrenched in a volume of Lovecraftian lore is often a slow-burn of exponentially rising delirium. In examining the skeletal outlines of Portal's work, one finds an uncanny resemblance to the way in which Lovecraft shaped his stories.

It seems appropriate to begin this short treatment with a personal anecdote concerning the path I took that eventually ends in my fervent praise of Portal's music. My interest was piqued around the release of their 2007 album, Outré, and I chose to engage in a few cursory listens of tracks at random. Almost immediately, I rejected them on the grounds that they were the ultimate example of the pseudo-"avant garde" plague of 21st century metal wherein groups operate on the principle of "style over substance"; in the case of Portal I was mistakenly convinced that the band simply relied on a gimmick of costumed live performances and music that seemed discordant and interestingly unorthodox on the surface but utterly banal when viewed through a more critical lens. This proved to be a fatal error on my part, for Portal's music is just like Lovecraft's fiction in that one must view their work from a certain holistic perspective if one is to have the slightest inkling of what they're seeking to accomplish with their work.

In the same fashion as their other full-lengths, the aforementioned Outré bears a single-word title in the form of an adjective that speaks volumes about the work itself. The band's debut, Seepia (a word that crops up in later songs like"Black Houses" as an apparently sentient force of some other-dimensional sort; this will be talked about briefly later) captures the visual component of the band's antiquarian tendencies, whereas 2009's Swarth fully harnesses the band's opaque sonic miasma that fully envelops the listener by means of aberrant fretboard gymnastics and unnerving, non-standard drum patterns. However, it is the title of "Outré" that drives home the crux of the central claim of i.). "Outré" is the past participle of the French verb "outrer", which, in the present tense, is best understood as meaning "to go beyond". The word itself operates in an almost idiomatic manner, as if there is some implicit physical baggage attached to the purely linguistic entity that surges in the listener/reader upon its utterance/appearance of the terminated action of having already "gone beyond". In the case of Portal, the word takes on a meaning that is eerily analogous to Lovecraft's own conception of the operative role of the term "weird" in "weird fiction":

"The crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen. If any unexpected advance of physics, chemistry, or biology were to indicate the possibility of any phenomena related by the weird tale, that particular set of phenomena would cease to be weird in the ultimate sense because it would become surrounded by a different set of emotions. It would no longer represent imaginative liberation, because it would no longer indicate a suspension or violation of the natural laws against whose universal dominance our fancies rebel."

Portal's employment of the term "outré", ostensibly to describe the essence of their music, is akin to what Lovecraft describes as "weird" in the above quote. The band uses this term in a rather sardonic manner by appealing to the futility found in the self-referential nature of language itself: a feeble attempt by humans to linguistically shackle a truly otherworldly phenomenon that our naive senses cannot fully grasp. Indeed, a great deal of Portal's implicit effect on the listener is entirely linguistic in nature. The band frequently opts for alternate spellings of already physically powerful words, thus multiplying the "other"-ness of the music ("Abysmill", "The Sweyy/Swayy", "Werships", "Marityme", "Seepia", etc.). While effective, the truly curious linguistic experiment that Portal uses to further distance themselves from the Euclidean, spatiotemporal realm is the aforementioned use of descriptive words like "swarth", "outré", and "seepia". These three words crop up a number of times throughout Portal's oeuvre, and the band's unorthodox use of them suggests something more than coincidentally similar to the construction of a mythos that Lovecraft sprinkled throughout his fiction. I could author an entire article on the role of these terms in Portal's discography, so a short examination of the term "swarth" will be the sole item of scrutiny for the sake of brevity, as it underscores the point I'm trying to make on its own.

"Souse in ichor, the clique transfuse
Volute the swarth, trawl betwixt phonotic
Scoff the festune"

-excerpt of"Abysmill", from 2007's Outré

"Ubiquitaint Of The Bellows...

Swarth

Hemorosphere Smothre The Othre
PlumeSurfeits
The Candent Recoil

Oust The Candent ...
Oust The Candent ...
Oust The Candent ..."

-excerpt of "Swarth", from 2009's Swarth

 

"Venous Stasis Fey Terminus
Lugubrious EverPuce Perforate/Disseminate
Polymouth Clotting Foul Exsanguinate
Psyphonetaneous Secrete

Caulk of Swarth... Scry"
-excerpt of "Writhen", from 2009's Swarth

The assumed use of "swarth", if it was to be used in everyday language, would effectively function as the archaic noun counterpart of the more common term, "swarthy" (note the subtle antiquarianism that the band, like Lovecraft, revels in). However, the listener is given an entirely different impression with the lyrics in conjunction with the compositions, as "swarth" in these contexts plays a multi-faceted role that suggests it is not so much an adjectival term as much as it is an abstract entity useful to invoke for the sake of incantations and other ritualistic endeavors. In "Abysmill", the visual (and physical) effect is something of an otherworldly cauldron typified by dreadfully ambiguous, indescribable scents emanating from a concoction being brewed for nefarious purposes, with "swarth" being a non-spatiotemporal ingredient for the "mereworking antibody" that the song describes. In the title track of Swarth, the word evolves to an internally consistent force unto itself; an immensely powerful abstract (perhaps sentient) source that one calls upon in order to "oust the candent" (that is, banish light in favor of darkness). Its role in "Writhen" is similar, as the song describes some sort of convulsive process of exsanguination for the sake of shedding the standard Euclidean mortal coil in order to use the corporeal, sanguine offerings (the "caulk of swarth") to perform a truly outré offering (perhaps one similar to those performed by devotees of the Cthulhu Cult or Esoteric Order of Dagon) inexplicable by the language of science.

An obvious criticism of Portal's lyrical madness is the seemingly unwieldy, sometimes incomprehensible organization of verbosity imbued within the text itself (a view I once held); but it is precisely this misguided criticism that highlights the brilliance of the band's lyrical deliberations. With each track, there is a clear sense of direction and meaning with regards to the linear direction that shines through on both the more straightforward, narrative tracks (usually songs on Outré explicitly dealing with actual Lovecraftian deities, such as "Omnipotent Crawling Chaos" and "13 Globes"), or the songs whose ebb and flow is achieved by means of groups of progressively descriptive stanzas that always move the song forward. This direction provides the general setting that houses the viscerally effective diction that usually defies all sense of organizational conventions we're familiar with, which is precisely the philosophical maxim upon which Portal's (and, to some extent, Lovecraft's) work rests.

This direction I speak of is the fundamental compositional convention that underscores the second point of my thesis. Lovecraft's fiction is so successful in physically entrancing the reader largely because of the man's prodigious command over the organic progression of the psychological state/s one would expect to find one's self in if confronted with the inexorable cosmic monstrosities that drive tales like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", At the Mountains of Madness, or "The Music of Erich Zann". In each tale, there is a non-linear cosmic impetus that reveals omnipresent, otherworldly madness at a cripplingly slow rate. In the case of the first tale, aside from an early up-close encounter with an acolyte of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, the narrator obtains all of his knowledge of the "Innsmouth look" and other mythical notions about the decaying town from three main anecdotes, each of which top the previous in the physical proximity of dread expressed in their tales (the ticket man in Newburyport, the grocery youth from Arkham, and Zadok Allen, respectively). Each character in the progression of story exudes an increasingly unsettled disposition that culminates in Zadok Allen's hysterical cries that precede his disappearance, ostensibly at the hands of the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

From here, the singular sense of dread that permeates the entire story has graduated from the realm of local mythology to a physically pertinent matter. Still, however, as the narrator returns to his precarious hotel room to be disturbed to the point of being forced to flee, neither the narrator nor the reader actually witness the agents attempting to infiltrate the narrator's room. The strangeness is multiplied, however, once he finally manages to escape his hotel room and attempt to flee the town. Short, ambiguous descriptions of a legion of swimming creatures approach from the sea, once again promoting the dread from the physically explicable to a vague semblance of supernatural horror. At the climax of the events in Innsmouth, the narrator is actually confronted with the fish-like creatures that eternally reside in the sea following a short tenure of living as a "human" bearing the blight of the "Innsmouth look". The pinnacle of the physical horror evoked in the mind of the reader, however, comes at the very end of the story when the narrator describes the following years wherein he seeks genealogical information that eventually links him to Obed Marsh, the man thought to be responsible for the ritualistic practices that consigned Innsmouth to a fate of otherworldly strangeness. His stance on the matter gradually transforms from repulsion to immense curiosity, and finally, in the last two paragraphs of the story, a bone-chilling acceptance of his hereditary fate; he has literally been consumed by the dread that has been the subject of the story:

"So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendours await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! No, I shall not shoot myself—I cannot be made to shoot myself!
 

I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever."

-Final lines of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"

By the end of the story, the reader has been subjected to a tale in which the horror upon which the entire tale is based has not been explicitly revealed until the tail-end of the final act, with masterful rising action moving the story along at an exponential rate. To demonstrate the relevance of this structural convention to our current investigation, I will simply deconstruct two of Portal's finest examples of this in the forms of "Larvae" and "Werships", respectively.

The former track deals with the birth and subsequent domination of an alien-esque insect horde with cosmic implications. A jarringly dissonant phrase begins the song before the lyrics begin amid a fairly tonal section that alternates between a drum beat suited for the procession of an army and frantic blast beats, all while the subjects of the song are described in esoteric detail:

"Domus Lacunae
Meta Matriculant
Theta Genus
Fait Accompli

OcturKnell Unfurl
Husks of Hearths Litter
Inquilines Dither"

At this point, the song shifts to a short cyclical section in which the incantation "Pupa to pupils..." is recited over and over in order to indicate the physical manifestation of the creatures. From here, Portal utilizes the low register of 8-string guitars to play a creeping, writhing riff that slowly elevates as the scene is set for the inevitable exaltation of the members of this "olde guarde dipteran order":

"Olde Guarde Dipteran Order
Spheres Flous Prod To The Marrow
Fly Anointment Prey Eclipsed"

 

It is at this point that the aforementioned cyclical riff is reintroduced for a similar albeit fundamentally different incantation of "pupils to master...". The creatures have now conquered the Earthly inhabitants of whatever realm they may be occupying, and the song explodes with a palpitating energy that signals the monarchy of this race of beings as vocalist The Curator continually bellows the name of this group, perhaps in some sort of twisted reverence:

"Olde Guarde Dipterous
Olde Guarde Dipterous
Olde Guarde Dipterous"

The song speaks for itself, and the points I have outlined above have been sufficiently demonstrated within the analysis of the song's ebb and flow itself. We now move on to "Werships", a colossal song that functions as a clarion call for the adherents of the cult found in "The Call of Cthulhu". An eerie introductory riff in which tones shift in a distinctly continuous manner (as opposed to a discrete process of quickly changing from one of the 12 tones to another) is played alongside a ritualistic march that alternates between mid-paced double-bass and tom drums until the song's main theme in the form of a truly bizarre minor 2nd interval shape is played over and over again to set the stage for the impending invocation. From here, The Curator howls over a rung-out chord of considerable dissonance (I haven't bothered actually dissecting the individual intervals to diagnose a particular chord, but suffice to say, it's unsettling) before the first instance of descriptive lyrics appear right before the three minute mark:

"Fogging Stark Crepuscules
Awash With Squalid Aghast
Course In Septic Blight"

Here we are given a description of the twilight during which this ritual is to take place over alternations between a vertical, "continuous" blasting riff and the aforementioned chord of unspeakable dissonance. The same general pattern follows for the next stanza, but there is a marked difference in the guitars, which have now moved up an octave or so and have begun to play a strangely different pattern in accordance with the shift in subject matter: now the devotees of the cult themselves:

"Drones Of Inequity
Servile Of The Manors Steer
Knell Of Antiquate Tide"

\

The pattern is again repeated to describe the alternate weird Boston landscape that Lovecraft created as the setting at which these entranced acolytes begin the ritualistic proceedings:

"Sub-Ornament Creaking Carcasses
Stagger Blackest Harbours
Moored Frothing Profuse"

It is here that the main phrase that defined the initial rising action is reprised in an entirely different context. The first incarnation of the phrase served to anticipate the oncoming action and vaguely cauterize the listener's psychological state with a sense of ambiguous fear. At this point in the song, the horror has become explicit and undeniable, as song shifts to its final section in which The Curator recites a cryptic mantra to the tone of a phrase that alternates between fast tremolo picking and gradually descending (in a tonal sense), palm-muted chugs:

"Bow Oh Graving Faces
Bow Oh Graving Faces
Bow Oh Graving Faces
Bow Oh Graving Faces"

The song ends with a sample and sets the stage for the formidably sepulchral album-closer, "Marityme". Much like the investigation of "Larvae", any further word drawing parallels between Portal's mastery of psychological songwriting and Lovecraft's prose would be superfluous.

At this point I'm satisfied with the evidence presented in defending the claims I made at the outset of this post. I conclude by remarking that the grasp Lovecraft had on the spectral and "weird" has only been rivaled by a handful of other authors that have dared to broach a subject of imposing philosophical depth; and the same can be said of Portal within the paradigm of death/black metal.

Pay to die, you sick motherfuckers

If pressed to select a single figure to represent the very essence of the metal underground, one would be incredibly foolish not to immediately grant the title to Paul Speckmann. Speckmann is, for all intents and purposes, the unsung godfather of death metal: a figure exalted to the highest level of genius by a tragically narrow few and condemned to obscurity by most in the shadow of less-deserving figures like Chuck Schuldiner. Speckmann, however, gives precisely zero fucks about the travesty that is his obscurity, as evidenced by his words of indifference regarding the greater success of other early death metal bands such as Death or Possessed. He's in it purely for the music and has been incessantly toiling in the underground for nearly three decades. He's metal all the way down; and the fact of the matter is that his contributions to the genre are of insurmountable importance due in no small part to his succinct, acerbic treatments of grand subjects that, in a fashion very similar to masters (pun intended) of the aphorism like Nietzsche or Shakespeare, express 20 pages of discourse in a phrase or two. Perhaps the most brilliant of his offerings of this sort comes in the form of "Pay to Die".

The song itself is a testament to the immense musical and philosophical potency of this genre. In seven words, Speckmann delivers a multi-faceted message of vitriol when he summarizes the absurdity of modern life with the profoundly simple proclamation: "pay to be born; pay to die". In his own words, from an interview with Jeff Tandy, Speckmann recounts the origin of the song:

"The song was about my father. He was always giving me hell and dragging me to church, and I was arguing with him over the years. Then he got sick and died, and obviously we had to pay to bury him, you know – “pay to die”! The words in the song speak for themselves – you pay to be born, you pay to die. It was real life for me at that time, and it hit really hard."

Jeff replies that the song itself seems to sum up American (read: modern) life, a suggestion to which Paul agrees. It is precisely this concise summary of life that makes it universally appealing. By and large, we live in a world dictated by monetary and utility values. Bouts with impassioned existential anxiety and theorizing on matters of abstraction, that is, activities that comprise the very essence of what it should mean to live a human life, are roadblocks in the modern zeitgeist that "Pay to Die" describes in which life is catalyzed, fueled, and eventually ended by petty material means. The venomous seven-word mantra simultaneously functions as a clarion call to action and a more general lamentation of the dreadful state of affairs in the modern world: a dual-edged blade that makes the song as viscerally moving as any piece of music I can think of.

In observing the development of the song itself from its various incarnations in Death Strike, Master, and eventually Speckmann Project, one can very nearly construct a well-informed history of death metal as a style unto its own. The song's debut on Death Strike's Fuckin' Death, released in January 1985, is best viewed as a microcosm of the formative years of extreme metal when the amorphous styles death metal, black metal, grindcore, and the like were simply a hazy amalgamation of similar influences from both metal and punk such as Venom, Slayer, and Discharge. Speckmann himself even notes that during the early years of Master/Death Strike, the term "death metal" wasn't in popular usage: they simply played "metal". An important feature to note of the earliest incarnation of "Pay to Die" is the eminent importance that the punk tendencies of Discharge play in driving the song. The drum beat is one of complete uniformity, and Speckmann's destructive vocals pay little heed to the inherent rhythm of the song as much as they do exist as an exclusively separate element of the song in their own right.

Move to the version we find on Master's self-titled 1990 album. There are a number of new things brought to the table with this performance of the song, each of which can be traced back to a predominantly greater "metal" orientation than the one found on Fuckin' Death or Master's 1985 rehearsal tape. The song begins with a percussive series of ascending and descending power-chord tones before bursting into the song's main "melodic" line at a slightly more fluid and urgent tempo. The subtle introduction of the second bass-drum in the verse, as well as the inclusion of abrupt fills indicate a movement away from the strict uniformity that defines earlier versions of the song. This movement away from the nascent form of death metal that the 1985 version epitomizes reaches its pinnacle in the version found on the 1992 Speckmann Project album, where the song is filtered through 7 years of fervent stylistic progression by means of the aforementioned movement away from structural and percussive uniformity. Simply put, the song is not only colossal on a philosophical level; it is also a standing monument to death metal as a whole.

The last nuance of the song I'd like to touch upon is the line bellowed at the end of the versions found on Master's self-titled album and the Speckmann Project album wherein Speckmann delivers the impassioned declaration: "pay to die, you sick motherfuckers". In this we find yet another dual meaning that only adds to the legacy of this masterpiece. Quite literally, we can take the term sick in a medical sense, with the line functioning as a juxtaposition of the loss of something as intangible as life with the utterly tangible notion of the modern world's fixation on material ends. The other interpretation logically follows where we may also take the term "sick" to indicate a moribund psychological state; as if Speckmann is diagnosing anyone that falls under the umbrella of defective mind-states the song describes. 

(note: the last video is actually of the version found on the Speckmann Project album).

Mayhem in 1986

Sparse fragments of this video have been on the web for some time now, in compromised quality, but this is the finest and most comprehensive version of it I've seen. To keep it short: this video is rich with metal history and should be viewed by everyone.

My neat observation: Look at how closely Euronymous's corpsepaint resembles that of King Diamond's in contrast to the styles he would adapt alongside fellow death fiends only a few years later. It would be interesting to see a visual delineation of the corpsepaint members of Mayhem used in parallel with commentary on their gradual progression toward (arguably) the archetypal second-wave black metal band.

In Defense of Modern "Old School" Death Metal

An increasingly predominant movement in modern metal comes in the form of death metal that very closely resembles canonical groups such as Incantation, Asphyx, Entombed, and the like in both sound and essence. I've noted that as the number of such bands that bear the dubious descriptor "new old-school death metal" has risen over the past few years, so has the number of detractors that decry the movement as nothing more than a futile retreading of worn musical ground. As an ardent fan of many bands that are routinely dismissed amidst a sea of insubstantial mimes, I feel it necessary to discuss why a great deal of the aforementioned detractors' arguments against the movement rest on precarious footing; and this may be succinctly demonstrated by means of three main points, each of which will be briefly expounded below:

i.) The importance of sonic tradition and reverence for previous masters of the style has always been of eminent significance in the metal craft, and failure to comprehend the stylistically conservative bent that is embedded in metal's history leads to inherently warped views of the bands in question.

ii.) Many bands with rich, fertile musical offerings are summarily and inaccurately assessed as "clones" for reasons that I feel may mostly be attributed to a combination of latent bias against the movement coupled with lazy listening habits.

iii.) Very similar to i.): The artificial construction of an "old-school" epoch in contrast with a post-golden era epoch is a categorical fiction that sits on shaky ground. The development of death metal must be looked at as a continuous, ever-changing lineal process as opposed to the common discrete demarcation of "old-school" and "new-school".

Though it can be said of a number of styles of music, metal is especially notorious for producing bands that morph a general fanbase into a divisive fervor; one is hard-pressed to rattle off a litany of groups that have procured nigh-universal praise. However, such groups do exist, and these classic acts have formed the basis of much subsequent metal on the obvious sonic level; but they have also played an integral role in establishing the extra-musical notions of "poseurdom" that is so omnipresent in the subculture. In a process very similar yet paradoxically antithetical to monotheistic traditions, certain artistic entities such as Celtic Frost, Bathory, Venom, Slayer, and in a more universal sense, Black Sabbath, are sacrosanct; and failure to adhere to their doctrines has traditionally resulted in being cast aside as a "poseur" without exception (the metal equivalent of a heretic/apostate). For me, the sheer sight of the word "Bathory" invokes a visceral yet immensely intricate physiological reaction that encapsulates everything I love about this style of music, and I know I'm far from the only one who feels this way.

What this demonstrates is that the unquestionable reverence for such canonical acts has played a significant role in the development of metal thus far. To rebuke bands like Dead Congregation purely for their use of the same general musical palette as Incantation and Immolation is to commit an act of complete absurdity. The truth is that stylistic development is a perpetual process in any style of any given medium of art; and given the quasi-divine status of the preeminent bands listed above, it's only sensible that we get the movement of death metal that exists in the state it does today.

Failure to acknowledge the content above most certainly plays a role in engendering the sort of attitude that fuels my second point of contention. The criticism of bands I have in mind comes in the general form "Newer Band X sounds like Older Band Y, rendering Newer Band X insignificant", and the problem with this is twofold. On one hand, it's a reinforcement of the dreadful evaluative process adopted by many that simply consists of a binary comparison from one band to another based on surfaces aesthetics, which is intimately related to the second problem wherein the aforementioned assessments are often found to be fatally hasty and inaccurate. Take the case of Vasaeleth, a band I've seen dismissed as a vapid Incantation clone by a number of people. This diagnosis is inaccurate for a number of reasons, two of which deal with the band's approach to song structure and lyrical composition. A structural triumph that is on display a number of times on their debut album, Crypt Born and Tethered to Ruin, is the form that songs like "Wrathful Deities", "Figures of Chained Spirits", and the colossal "Gateways to the Cemetery of Being" utilize wherein an introductory section is succeeded by a section that acts as the classical "theme" of each song as it is reintroduced and manipulated in various contexts throughout the duration of each respective track. This structural convention logically endows the lyrics with a sense of ebb and flow, which is best portrayed in the aforementioned "Gateways to the Cemetery of Being": A song that embodies the chaotic essence of a sacrificial ritual with its abrupt musical changes and staccato-esque libretto.

Qualities such as those explicated above are essential in making Vasaeleth's debut the great work that it really is, and they simply cannot be gleaned from a cursory listen or two that allows the listener to absorb little beyond surface aesthetics. Vasaeleth is only one such case; I could offer equally valid cases for other bands like Grave Miasma and their fittingly miasmic approach to composition that often hints at Demoncy, Dead Congregation's unique mastery of the relationship between music and lyric to, Impetuous Ritual's uncanny ability to create an organic, seamlessly flowing work of art that very much is a ritual unto itself, and many others.

A rather nebulous tendency when looking at the history of metal from its origins to the present day is to bifurcate the developmental process of death metal into two eras of pre-1994/5 and post-1994/5, which is surely where this notion of an "old school" comes from. Now, I can sympathize with this tendency, as I will acknowledge a sort of "golden era" that ended around the release of Morbid Angel's Domination: A work that can retrospectively be seen as a sort of death knell for a once fertile musical style. However, the said bifurcation comes with its dangers; dangers that motivate this entire post. The fact of the matter is that death metal continued to flourish, albeit perhaps with longer intervals of silence, with classic, and most importantly, innovative, works by Immolation, Gorguts, The Chasm, Deeds of Flesh, and many others sporadically appearing from 1996 up until the middle of the new millennium; around the time this modern "old school" death metal movement began to take off with the release of Repugnant's Epitome of Darkness in 2006 (this seems as good an album as any to mark as the arbitrary beginning of this arbitrary "movement"). The corollary of this is self-evident and evinces the central claim of iii.).

Don't get me wrong, there certainly are a number of disposable clones in the modern death metal sphere. However, many groups such as those mentioned above are unfairly lumped in with the dime-a-dozen bands that are rightfully ignored. I only ask that the reader reflect upon what I have written above and consider such points when approaching post-9/11 death metal offerings.  

"Blood on stone and shell. Fragments of dead flesh lay torn in corresponding pattern in parallel to demonic being. Plagues cast on life forms. Fumes of putrid spirit
To bless what comes with the horizon with devotion to the coming death. Wretched curses on dead flesh. The cleansing of stone and shell."

Outset

This blog exists as a vehicle to publicly exhibit any thoughts regarding metal music that I wish to make public. The focus is simple: (somewhat) critical analysis of heavy metal that happens to creep in my head at any given time. Any further word would be superfluous; just read the damn posts and the essence of the blog will be clear.