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DESCRIPTION FROM CRUCIAL BLAST:
Now available on limited edition audio cassette with different artwork than the previous cd and vinyl versions, limited to three hundred copies.
Vexovoid is the fourth album from Australian mutants Portal, a band that has continued to confound listeners with an idiosyncratic and otherworldly take on death metal that reached a new level of suffocating, eldritch weirdness on their albums Swarth and Outre. As with those albums, Vexovoid features slippery, malformed death metal, discordant blackened chaos and visions of alien horrors, but there is a clarity to Portal's sound on this album that is markedly different from previous outings.
The pounding percussive violence that opens Vexovoid is surprisingly straightforward, at least by Portal standards; the sludgy droning riffage and spastic, thunderous drumming that powers "Kilter"'s chaotic swarm is more defined and chunky than the sort of ultra-murky formless deathblast that their other albums are known for; at the same time, the discordant, reptilian horror you'd expect is fully formed here, alive in the slithering droning riffs and bizarre angular arrangement of the song, still sounding like an otherworldly, alien take on Incantation's early, sludgy death metal. And in its final minutes, this song lurches into a blasting minor key majesty that definitely feels like something new gouting from Portal's black maw.
On "The Black Wards", Portal continues to reveal this more coherent side to their music, the drumming taking on an almost industrial feel at certain points, the rapid chain-gun blastbeats rattling off mechanically below the slippery, surging riffs, and the Curator's bizarre inter-dimensional incantations are easier to pick out among the scattershot riffs, lines like "...cognizant eschewal / plight of Gammon Psyche / the lightness Shrewd / Zugzwang Gordian blighting / Dissorderlies Strewn..." reading like excerpts from a Kenji Siratori novel. The rest of the album is still plenty psychotic, still like some bizarre interpretation of Gorguts and Disembowelment beamed back from some malevolent insect-controlled dimension, the songs swarming with crushing discordant guitars, ghastly gasping vocals and mutant anti-grooves, twisted counter-intuitive time signatures and sudden, wildly jarring shifts in tempo, and awesome breakdowns where the chaotic blasting suddenly downshifts into a soundtrack-worthy section of apocalyptic might; for instance, the end of "Plasm", where riffs turn into foghorn blasts and Portal's churning maelstrom begins to freeze into a backwards-moving wash of withered death-drone, and the strange depth-charge doom of closer "Oblotten".
It feels like Portal's most complex work so far, the swirling, vomitous riffs and dissonant leads interlocking with greater definition than before, revealing a monstrous complexity at work within the band's pounding, atonal, droning death metal chaos. One of my fave death metal albums of '13 so far. Its one of the band's coolest looking albums too, with artwork from both Rev. Kriss Hades and Industrie Chimere Noire gracing the sleeve.
© CRUCIAL BLAST
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THIS IS A NEW, UNPLAYED ITEM. Please note that for LP vinyl orders, we usually remove the vinyl from the jacket prior to
shipment in order to avoid seam splits or any other kind sleeve/jacket damage that might occur during transit. This may
require that we open the shrinkwrap on the record in order to carefully remove the vinyl from the inside of the jacket (if
the record was originally shrinkwrapped). Feel free to contact us with any questions regarding this policy.
Crucial Blast is an independant underground label, online shop and micro-press specializing in cutting edge, transgressive,
experimental heavy music and related cultural artifacts, with a particular focus on avant-metal, black noise/industrial, dark
ambience, infernal psychedelia, and hardcore improv/free-jazz. You'll find everything from art-damaged European metalcore to
amplifier-exploding psychedelic drones to earth-shaking post-Ayler destructo-jazz in our listings, which we update roughly
every two weeks with both brand new releases and rare finds from the vaults.
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REWRITTEN, OR BORROWED IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION FROM CRUCIAL BLAST.
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::: SHIPPING AND PAYMENT INFO :::
Payment for your order is expected within SEVEN DAYS from the end of auction/buy it now purchase. Our turnaround time for
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Don't forget to check out all of our other CRUCIAL BLAST-approved avant-metal/black industrial/trasngressive art items and
releases that are available in our Ebay store and on auction. We also have many out-of-print and rare items available in our
catalog as well...
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| CRUCIAL BLAST: An online shop specializing in
experimental metal, black industrial, black psychedelia, noise rock, dark ambience, and other forms of cutting edge and
left-field heaviness. We also carry a carefully curated selection of books and other printed materials from the realms of
black surrealism and transgressive thought.
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