On Devil Music (out now on Run For Cover Records) Austin, Texas three-piece Portrayal of Guilt up the ante with a thirty-minute barrage of inventively malevolent extreme metal, firmly achieving what they’ve hinted at on recent releases: greatness.
Comprising a fifteen-minute, five-track session followed by the same tracks re-recorded with orchestral strings, acoustic bass, and brass, what would otherwise have been a delightfully vicious little EP is given a whole new dimension — each track of the second half presenting the first side as a kind of Satanic medieval mini-odyssey.
In lesser hands, it could have ended up gimmicky, but what Devil Music shows is that vocalist/guitarist Matt King, bassist Alex Stanfield, and drummer James Beveridge have boundless creativity coupled with faultless extreme metal sensibilities.
The key to the album’s success is how strong the five songs are. ‘One Last Taste of Heaven’ opens with a real earworm of a guitar riff and drums like an avalanche of bricks.
A jarring clean guitar tone signals the quick transition into ‘Untitled’, which in turn neatly morphs into ‘Burning Hand’, with noisy textures underpinning the clanging guitars.
‘Where Angels Come to Die’ crams death metal blasting, a sinister slowly building breakdown, and a black metal blizzard into just over three and a half minutes, before the title track announces its arrival with a killer “money riff”.
The “final track” – as well as containing more great, atmospheric passages – pays off with a great mid-track mantra by King: “I want to watch you suffer. I want to feel your pain” (one of the first times you really make out the lyrics) before the band launches into a final riff reminiscent of Great Southern Trendkill-era Pantera.
All throughout, King’s vocals are an impressive assault of strangled, screaming venom. It’s one of the key features that gives the whole release a black metal veneer, but it undersells the creative brilliance of this release to pigeonhole the band as playing any one style.
Certainly, at this point, the screamo tag the band’s own press releases still reference can be done away with. Aside from early inspirations like Majority Rule, the band has evolved through the recent We Are All Alone and Christfucker to cite influences as broad as Korn, grindcore, and Celtic Frost.
The latter makes a lot of sense when listening to the second half of this release — Tom G. Warrior having so memorably carved out a particular avant-garde extreme metal sound on Into The Pandemonium with the use of orchestral instrumentation. Just as it added a certain classical majesty to Celtic Frost 35 years ago, so it does here too.
If anything, tracks like ‘One Last Taste of Heaven’ and the title track are even more impressive, reworked with anxiety-inducing strings and ominous horns.
The band has indicated a fascination with film soundtracks (in fact the whole second half of this release has its own short movie to go with it) and the music wields a power that could accompany images of Viking ships approaching over a horizon of smoke and fire.
…or maybe Satan descending on a twisted Hieronymus Bosch landscape.
All of this should be more than sufficient to illustrate how great I think this album is, but there’s one more association that deserves mention: Today Is the Day.
If King or his bandmates have ever cited the genius of TITD’s ever-present Steve Austin, I’ve missed it, but not enough people talk up the band, and whether by conscious design or not, this record repeatedly evokes Austin and co.
Whether it’s the mid-track riffing on ‘Untitled’, or the hushed, ghoulish vocals on ‘Where Angels Come to Die’, the deep screaming on ‘Devil Music’, or just the continual capacity to jump from one brilliantly twisted passage to another, it certainly sounds like TITD has entered the DNA of this band.
To say that Portrayal of Guilt has successfully evoked the spirit of what I consider to the most fearlessly creative extreme metal band of the past 30 years is just about the highest praise I can give the guys.
And if you like this album, but don’t know Today Is The Day, get on it.
Show me a more exciting extreme metal release than this in 2023, and it’ll surely have a big neon sign flashing above it, reading: ALBUM OF THE YEAR CONTENDER.
Buy the album here:
https://portrayalofguilt.bandcamp.com/album/devil-music
9 / 10
TOM OSMAN