Portal - Ion

I really wanted to get to this album sooner, but things have a way of prolonging other things in life sometimes, and this was just the case for Ion.
At just under 37 minutes, Ion is a chaotic, thrashy, proggy careening through time and space that makes itself unpredictable at the musical motif level at every turn. By that I mean that sinister, dehydrated growls, semi-lo-fi speed-picked guitar riffs, and blast beats cover the album from start to finish (aside from the ambient segments that sandwich the death metal meat of the album), but what the band chooses to do with them is what’s interesting and ceaselessly captivating.
While a lot of technical death metal can easily forget to be intriguing and comes off as wankery, Portal take great care to arrange the musical ideas they create into continuous, chaotic pieces that give a feeling of falling through some endless, spiraling void. The climbing and falling guitar lines on songs like “Phreqs” and “ESP ION AGE” contribute exquisitely to this feeling of being gravitationally flung from high to low over and over and over again and the booming industrial drum crashes on “Phantom” do a fine job of accenting the morbid riffs beneath them in particular. The band also use a cohesive washing sound of fast death metal mixed with some industrial background to cement this grey-ish abysmal atmosphere across the album.
What I think Ion achieves that I can’t, off the top of my head, think of having been achieved by another fast, technical death metal album is an unorthodox attaining of a very doom metal-esque or even black metal-esque vibe, and it makes for probably one of the most interesting and unique technical death metal releases I’ve heard in a long time.
The album is thoroughly enjoyable both as a more unusually produced technical death metal album with intricate part arrangements and instrumental interplay to pay close attention to and dissect and also as a thoroughly harrowing, atmospheric experience to simply sit back and fall subject to. Either way, it’s certainly an unforgettable experience and one of the year’s best albums so far.

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