I agree...
Portal - Outre
Illogium - Guitar
The Curator - Vocals
Aphotic - Guitars
Elsewhere - Bass
Monocular - Drums
A vague unease. An otherworldly omnipresent buzz of some hideous pseudomusical contrivance. The impropriety of minimalistic hollow thumping that one can only conjecture to be percussion. And suddenly the world you've expected to forever remain in place quickly and utterly dissipates, leaving you alone with this baffling and hideous extradimensional abomination. You can only sit and stare bug-eyed into the aperture of recently vacated space before you as the icy, serrated fingers of unfathomable eldritch horrors maliciously tickle your flesh, as if trying to get at the delectable essence cowering just beneath the material surface.
Yup. That's Portal in a nutshell. Australia's quintet of Stygian Strangers have summoned forth their second full-length album from the depths of some hidden, unlit abyss. Recall my review of
Catacombs' In the Depths of R'Lyeh, wherein I stated that said album captured the feeling of utter terror that overcomes one when reading H.P. Lovecraft better than any other album in history. Well, now that statement needs to be qualified, because while Catacombs did a near-perfect job of setting to music the ponderous dread of witnessing the untold horror and desolation that would be wrought by the Great Old Ones if they were ever to awaken on Earth, Outre is much more apt at aurally expounding the faceless, formless, chaotic entities that dwell beyond the stars - things that our withering spheroid could never contain.
Outre is an album with a distinctly inhuman ambience to it. There is little regard here for quaint things like melody, harmony and anything resembling conventional structure. Instead, there is a wholly alien sense of malignance, as though this album - much in the same manner as those untold Lovecraftian beings - has little esteem for the concerns of humanity or anything else that dwells on this planet. The motives behind Outre are inexplicable to those constrained by the limits of human language, and to those with our unrefined and narrow conception of ‘music' and ‘sound'. The majority of its 36:40 earth minutes [it's entirely possible that this album actually goes on indefinitely, but anything beyond that 36:40 is imperceptible to the primitive human ear] consist of the most grating, filthy, surrealist noisescapes, the subtle nuances of which can only be distinguished by the most astute of listeners. The ungodly swelling and ebbing of this primeval buzz defies any rational conception of what music can sound like.
When this album actually does break into what can be thought of as a more traditional approach to music, the result is no less terrifying, bearing the hallmarks of the most thunderous and dissonant extreme metal ever conceived. Comparisons in these moments of clarity [which appear with greater frequency as the album proceeds – whether this is by design or chance, one can only speculate] can be drawn to the likes of
Immolation and
Deathspell Omega; good company to be in.
Outre's packaging is also noteworthy, in that it comes as a brilliant ‘fuck-you' to those who would attempt to pirate the album. The artwork is a splendid collection of surrealist horror sketches, and the photography is equally unnerving and bizarre. The layout itself, which consists of a gatefold slipcase with two compartments – one for the booklet and one for a smaller slipcase containing the disc – is in itself unique.
Buy this album if you like music that's singularly ugly, vulgar and violent.
