I’m a sucker for a guitar being played like Satan insolently twanging barbed wire. ‘Backstabber’, the first track on Austin trio Portrayal of Guilt’s fourth album …Beginning of the End, begins in such a manner. For a band whose debut album was called Let Pain Be Your Guide, this is to be expected, but don’t let congruence dispel the thrill.
Unless you have the album’s lyric sheet in front of you, it’s quite difficult to pick out the words on ‘Human Terror’, though this seems beside the point. It could be about genocide or a two-faced line manager. What is certain is that a Trent Reznor and Massive Attack collab would sound as grimy as hand sanitiser in comparison.
Portrayal of Guilt do nihilistic hardcore, black metal, ‘classic screamo’, and all three at once through a supercharged fuck-it-all filter. ‘Heaven’s Gate’ is the sound of screeching Gollums wrecking the celestial house party and flipping it into the Upside Down. If it had been released in Stavanger in 1985, it would be heralded as a black metal classic.
What we need after such mayhem is a flute interlude or some spoken word, but instead we get ‘Under Siege’, which will seriously jeopardise your neck muscles. You may as well book the doctor’s appointment now. It does calm down *slightly* with some spiralling bass that culminates in Purple Rain-like synth, but you’ll still be shattered.
Gated reverb Bonham drums kick off ‘Ecstasy’, which has Satan on bass duties. The chiming guitar arpeggio gives it – whisper it quietly under all the evil – an ‘Eat My Goal’ funk. Texan nihilists recreating 90s football indie bop? You heard it here first. However, the ‘chorus’ is Ten Inch Nails. Rather appropriately, ‘Death From Above’ shares the scuzz of your typical Death From Above 1979 track. Again, we must shepherd the word chorus with quotation marks – it would be more accurate to use the term ‘ribcage crush punch’.
On next track ‘God Will Never Hear Me’ a female vocalist appears. Maybe it’s Liz Fraser? Anything Cocteau Twins can do, Portrayal of Guilt can do weirder. ‘Chamber of Misery Pt. IV’ most definitely features Slim Guerilla. Imagine Holy Bible-era Manics collaborating with Q-Tip on a track with the working title ‘Auschwitz Meat Grinder’. At one point on ‘Total Black’ you’ll be taken by surprise by the stomach-drilling howls of scorching demons. Nihilism seems too quaint a category: ‘Total Black’ is so bleak, it makes nothing seem like an abundance.
Believe it or not, ‘Object of Pain’ brings a degree of relief. For the first minute it’s sombre in the style of Interpol, and the waves of frazzled guitar are only marginally more threatening than Limp Bizkit. But have no fear – fear ends the album, and isn’t ‘The Last Judgement’ the most perfect title? The drumming at the start is faster than an epileptic hummingbird and the ‘singing’ manages to manifest the pain of a million tortured souls. If the Orange Demon and War Fetish Hegseth insist on our collective disappearance, then they may as well use the last two seconds of ‘The Last Judgement’ as a warning. It won’t hurt to let an amplified man-rottweiler brutalise our cochleas just before our atoms separate.
It’s so easy to dismiss black metal and the like as pedal-driven parody and easy noise. Portrayal of Guilt sound truly pissed off about everything. If you’re having a bad day or a bad life, spend some of your earthly currency on …Beginning of the End. You don’t need to scream on your own anymore.
…Beginning of the End is out now via Run For Cover Records
Portrayal of Guilt: Bandcamp | Instagram
Review by Neil Laurenson