Portal

Okay. I just want to know how I - having been a metal fan since 1983 when I realized that Duran Duran and/or The Thompson Twins simply weren't capable of touching my dark, troubled soul with their neon pink bubble gum lyrics - have never heard of Australian death/black metal hybrid band Portal before today.

Why haven't any of you inconsiderate pricks informed me of the nightmarish genius of this incredibly horrifying, fucking twisted, cosmically warped, in-your-face funereal, sickeningly morbid bunch of bastards, bearing names like Aphotic Mote and Omenous Fugue? What the fuck, people? This shit is right up my alley! It's bleak, demonic, completely insane, totally devoid of any sense of goodness, slimier than an Equatorial snail farm during a salt flood and blacker than a woodchuck's asshole stuffed into the thumb hole of a bowling ball and then tucked inside of a burlap sack and thrown into a sinkhole. Inside of an outhouse. In Dehnzev, Russia. In the middle of a long, hard winter.


Look at this mutherfucker! I have no idea who the hell he is. He calls himself The Curator and he's the fucking lead werewolf possessed by a chainsmoking demon singer of Portal. He's got goddamned tentacles on his fingers! He never reveals his face on stage. He wears giant wizard hats, towering black pope hats and/or a fucking grandfather clock over his face, depending on his mood. For all I know, it could be Nicholas Cage under there. Oh god, please don't be Nicholas Cage under there.


This band's music is fucking horrifying! I believe it entirely possible that overlong exposure to this music will turn one into a goddamned White Walker. Lab rats exposed to 24 straight hours of Portal's music has produced bizarre anomalies and mutations, including the retraction of the tympanic membranes of the ear into the lower intestines, the spinal cord being replaced with a length of rusted rebar coated in permafrost and the soul being entirely emptied of its positive contents into the nearest possible garbage disposal. Interestingly, if you play Portal in your kitchen, your garbage disposal will uproot itself from its foundations and exit the house, having realized its pointlessness in attempting to compete with The Curator's vocal chords. Said garbage disposals have been overheard to exclaim: "Well fuck me, why bother?" Further, it is entirely possible that no one in Portal actually plays guitar, but merely amplifies the screams of newborn infants being rubbed over ancient cheese graters. Neither are bass and drums incorporated - what you mistook for a rhythm section is actually the sound of Odin beating the shit out of a Balrog with an aircraft carrier.

Holy shit, look at this fucking album cover!! They managed to squeeze both Reggie Nalder as master vampire Kurt fucking Barlow and Cthulhu into one big goddamned freakyass collage! I just came so hard I became airborne for a few seconds. Lead guitarist Horror Illogium has described Portal's intent as "to capture a cinematic horror scope". Dude, you fucking succeeded beyond your wildest, twisted dreams. I couldn't be more horrified if I was hogtied naked, bent double over a butcher's table, watching baby animals get slaughtered alive in an abbatoir by a naked guy wearing a hogs decaying head and wielding a chainsaw whilst "The Sound Of Music" blasts over hidden loudspeakers at top volume. Metal music and horror movies have always gone hand in hand, but Portal has actually raped, sodomized, murdered and dismembered both and then stitched them back together into a patchwork skin coat. Writing for Popmatters, Adrien Begrand noted that "death metal always pretends to be scary, but... it's all rather harmless. That said, however, I make no mistake in saying that the death metal peddled by Australia’s Portal is truly friggin' terrifying". In other news, rice is white, rain is wet and the Duggar sons might not be the best choice to babysit your children.

Seriously, check out this fucking creepy mini-movie/music video for the song "Curtain" based on the poem "The Conqueror Worm" by Edgar Allan mutherfucking Poe. Just LOOK AT IT, for fucks sake! Gah! The only way this shit could get any creepier would be if they shot it on the swollen belly of a pregnant spider that had just crawled out of a festering pustule on a corpse's ass.

That was a compliment!
And I still want to know why I am JUST NOW hearing about this band? I mean, geez - I know I never buy magazines, listen to the radio or attend concerts unless garbed in full Hazmat gear and barbed wire, but GEEZ! You'd think I would have heard of them before now! Where the fuck have you guys been all of my diseased, tumultuous, mentally disturbed life?