Portal - Outre' (2007)

   Portal showed up as an experimental death metal band, that in their case basically means experimentations for a new alternative how to make death metal harder to go into. Basically for similar endeavors there's technical and progressive brutal death, that could pile up theme and tempo switches limitlessly, and of course progressive brutal death also might involve musical features of other styles, even non-metal style features.
   In general Portal's methods aren't too different, since even by first hearing their music sounds slightly mixed. But while most technical and progressive brutal death releases having crystal clear sound to highlight the plenty of details of the music, Portal embedded noisy, dirty and unfriendly Incantation influenced riffs and song structures into confusing disharmony. This disharmony they tried to unify or to convert to harmony by sizzling, atmospheric blackened sound and themes. Through this pretty simple, easily identifiable and often monotonously repeating instrument or effect noises offering guide for the listener. These are also having disharmonic effect, but the same time they meant to give an own identity for each song. In total, even if Portal's methods are similar to most technical brutal death bands, they're not flooding the listener with countless theme switches, but instead they prefer to switch between harmony and disharmony with kinda predictable frequency. Despite the various paradox solutions that their music include, it keeps staying unified, thanks to their noise preference and the strongly atmospheric blackened touch that's also responsible for their music's pretty obscure impression. This could make their albums long time enjoyable, and not only for the fans of technical brutal death.