Portal / Rites of Thy Degringolade - The Sweyy / Our Dreadful Sphere

PORTAL / RITES OF THY DEGRINGOLADE - The Sweyy / Our Dreadful Sphere (Ancient Darkness Production - CD 2005)

Wow, I just got a bunch of CDs, released by Denmark’s Ancient Darkness and here is one, which I had to listen to straight away, because it is Portal (!!) on their split CD with Rites of Thy Degringolade. I honestly don’t know all the music, which Portal has released, but so far everything what I have heard from this band sounded so damn awesome and intriguing that I simply must get all their music. So, along with “Outre” this split is a good start. And then the split contains also songs from Rites of Thy Degringolade, which I had no knowledge about until yesterday, so it is always a cool thing to hear also some new, unknown bands (even if they split up already hehe)!

And first comes Portal of corpse, with three tracks of their… hmm, how can we describe the unique sound of this Australian band? Cacophonic, chaotic, insane, dismal, obscure death metal? You can try to describe it with many words, but who cares, you just must hear it to understand that it is not an average, typical death metal band, but something totally different. And unique. We all can call it death metal and sure, there are some riffs and particular fragments, which may bring some resemblance to such Immolation, Angel Corpse, even a bit of Morbid Angel… but it must be said that Portal arranges their music in totally unusual way, adding a lot of weird patterns through their songs, so in the end it just sounds like something you’ve never heard before. A lot of distortion, cacophony, noise, chaos, but also aggression, then there’s this absolutely fascinating dark, ghastly and eerie atmosphere, which Portal generates with their sounds... Damn, the way this band sounds is so unordinary, but also mesmerizing that it becomes impossible to focus on something else than the music. And when these three songs finish, I just want to play them again! Yes, Portal is absolutely amazing. Especially “Werships” sounds like a great, heavy, crushing masterpiece.

And now Rites of Thy Degringolade. I really have never heard about this band before (formed by a guy from Weapon) and I am not even sure whether their music actually fits to Portal, speaking of this split CD… but on the other hand this is also very good band indeed, I like their three anthems, so if Rites of Thy Degringolade fits to Portal or not, it just doesn’t matter. Their music is more black / death metal and when I listen to it I feel like they’re a black metal version of such Angel Corpse and Impiety, speaking of the intensity, aggression, barbarism and atmosphere of these sounds. It surely is very powerful and extreme stuff, not so focused on the atmosphere, as Portal, but on aggression. And such “Our Dreadful Sphere” is excellent, in my opinion, here is where I can hear those Angel Corpse influences the most. It is always great to find some new, unknown before bands and now I had a pleasure to listen to Rites of Thy Degringolade and I am very satisfied with it and will surely try to get some more recordings of them. I can see that they already split up, but there are three full length albums waiting for me to be discovered, which I will do in a proper time. Not as awesome as Portal, but also good! And Portal… Damn!

Final rate: 75/100