As a reviewer, you owe it to the artists you write about to make a good faith effort to evaluate their music on its own terms. This means having at least a basic understanding of the conventions and standards that apply in different situations. But in the case of
Portal, it's genuinely hard to know what those standards are. The conventions are clear enough: this is death metal (maybe even "underground" death metal), so there needs to be dense and hellacious noise, mostly centered in the bass registers; there should be some frenetic drumming, but it should be recorded very mushily; there should be lyrics about how God is dead or ought to be dead, and maybe some stuff about rotting flesh and/or cannibalism; and there should be a singer who sounds like Cookie Monster belching from the lower pits of hell. The problem with these conventions is that they make evaluation almost impossible. Do you judge the music based on volume? On gutturalness? On degree of sacrilegious profanity? Some death metal bands offer guitar pyrotechnics, but
Portal doesn't even throw you that bone -- every song on this album (with the possible exception of "The Swayy") consists almost entirely of undifferentiated roar. You'll be nearly halfway through the title track before you realize that there's even a voice in the mix -- and it's a good thing you can't hear it well, because
Portal's lyrics are the purest pseudo-occult twaddle: "Domus lacunae/Meta matriculant/Theta genus/Fait accompli" runs the opening stanza of the first song, while others string together lines like "lapsing tidal sinergy pulpittates" and "symbionts molten behest" and still others command the listener to "harbour the spleen" and "be as our gruel." (Is it possible that this whole thing is a joke?) As mood music goes, this album serves the purpose as well as any other underground death metal album. But it's not easy to say what, if anything, sets it apart.