Sweden's MASS WORSHIP released one of the finest metal debuts of the last decade. The opening track on that self-titled record began with a riff so monumentally heavy that some of us are still picking bits of skull out of the furniture. The rest of the album was just as good. As a result, "Portal Tombs" has a lot to live up to. There was something instantly magical about this band's sound: a brutal, white-knuckle midpoint between the blistered left-field hardcore of BREACH, and the buzz-saw bellicosity of Stockholm's seminal death metal scene — it nimbly defies categorization. Second time out, MASS WORSHIP have no real reason to veer off track, and "Portal Tombs" does exactly what it needs to: reinforce how exciting this band are, via an even more crushing and creative batch of songs than the ones on the debut. In keeping with the previous album's spectacular opening, "Specular Void" is another utterly fearsome statement of intent. Arriving on a slow-fade flurry of tribal drums, it slams and flails forward on a swaggering bulldozer groove, oozing vitriol and existential dread; all underpinned by riffs of audacious brilliance, and propelled along by frontman Claes Nordin's venomous roar. The title track is even heavier, as the pace drops slightly for diversions into harrowing, discordant sludge that emerge from the overpowering squall of MASS WORSHIP's collective forward thrust. Once again, they sound quite unlike anyone else and yet there is something elemental and ageless flickering at the heart of the storm. A gleeful distortion of death metal tropes, "Revel in Fear" stirs up a monochrome blur of percussive violence and myopic churn; the lurching, schizophrenic "Orcus Mouth" is mutant noise rock on steroids enshrouded in a black fog of cavernous reverb. Semi-instrumental "Unholy Mass" offers a slight change of pace, with its tense but inexorable slow-build and final, juddering payoff, while "Dunes of Bone" evokes rolling waves of mortal debris via a sinister, sustained rumble and jagged shards of syncopated riffing. The album's most cheerfully violent moment, "Scorched Earth" is all post-punk pounding and machine-gun kicks founded on yet another irresistible groove; in contrast, "Empyrean Halls" wallows in the insidious creep of slower tempos, with an air of Lovecraft-ian horror seeping through its languid, toxic onslaught. And if all of that doesn't sate your appetite for being soundly bludgeoned, the closing "Deliverance" almost certainly will. A stately, imperious crawl through untold horrors, it takes seven blissfully excruciating minutes to make its (presumably) nihilistic point, with just a hint of sobering melody filtering through cracks in this band's armored, sonic façade. Like everything else on "Portal Tombs", it noisily proclaims MASS WORSHIP to be one of the most unique and enthralling metal bands on the planet right now. Again.
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