ninehertz

Portrayal of Guilt are surely the most exciting of the bigger name hardcore bands, in terms of the experimentalism in the face of retaining a core heaviness that still manages to shake you to your core.

…Beginning of the End is their latest evidence, an album that if it were from anyone else would be lauded as wildly and successfully ambitious yet is unsurprisingly so in their hands. You leave having heard new things as well as being bruised by the metallic assault.

The early run of tracks rough you up. Human Terror greets you with the dirtiest guitar sound you can imagine, before slipping into such a messy, gnarly and vicious groove. It is hardcore and extreme metal combined to sound dangerous. Heaven’s Gate follows with harsh vocals and pounding drums that push towards black metal territory, tempers into an electro-charged atmosphere – a concoction of strangeness and darkness. Then there’s the exhilarating Under Siege, with its crust goodness into glorious hardcore guitar drops.

At which point, they get restless and, as is their way, go off at a completely different angle. Ecstasy has a dirty bass running a hip-hop line, as much electronica as metal, while Death from Above has a dissonant, purposefully disjointed rhythmical pattern and spooky spoken word approach. They invite guest vocalists Jenna Rose on to the brooding semi-industrial and organic monster that is God Will Never Hear Me, and Slim Guerilla for a pure 66-second-long hip hop track.

The whole is like wandering down a slightly dodgy urban backstreet at night and hearing all manner of noises coming from clubs and homes, all at once. It is wild and invigorating with it. It doesn’t end there either, with distant reminders of Nine Inch Nails industrial through Reznor styled vocals at one point, and unorthodox song structures on another that are strangely appealing.

It fittingly ends by bringing many of these disparate sounds together on The Last Judgement, with its blackened hardcore into pure black metal intensity latter referencing noise-rock, industrial and impinging on the fabric of doom. It encapsulates a madly experimental album, one that despite its raw, ugly and primitive metallic soul finds ways to incorporate whatever they feel like, making for a breathless, eye-opening adventure.