If you're a regular reader of this blog then you've probably realized by now that we're not exactly huge fans of contemporary music. With the exception of Sergeant D most of us here at Metal Inquisition stopped caring about new music right around the time Danzig released Blackacidevil. The fact of the matter is that, for the most part, new music--in particular new metal--sucks. I've tried to keep up with some of my favorite older bands and check out new ones, but nine times out of ten it leads to nothing but disappointment. It's for this simple reason that you're most likely to catch Lucho and I fighting over the ipod in his BMW with him wanting to listen to Steely Dan and me wanting to listen to Skrewdriver. From time to time, however, to my complete and total amazement a new band will come along and blow my mind to pieces. The most recent example of this that I can think of is the Australian black/death metal hybrid mindfuck that is Portal. They released their first album back in 2003 and have since then released two more albums, each better than the last, which leads me to their most recent album and masterpiece, Swarth, which was just released earlier this week by Profound Lore.
Maybe my expectations are just incredibly low now because of how shitty most new metal albums are, but of the handful of new albums I've heard this year Swarth is far and away the best. I haven't been this excited about a new album since Decrepit Birth's Diminishing Between Worlds, and I think Swarth might even end up surpassing that album's awesomeness. I'm not a poet, but I'll do my best to describe the music on Swarth--it's bleak, dense, twisted, and fucking heavy. It's one of the most unique and legitimately unsettling records I've heard in a long, long time. You can barely even make out what's going on musically; it's a whirlwind of sound threatening to collapse at any moment, but Portal somehow manages to hold it together long enough to create this ferocious and suffocating wall of sound that relentlessly marches on for a solid forty minutes. Words fail me at a time like this so if you've been as bored with recent metal releases as I've been then I highly suggest checking out Swarth and Portal's two previous albums.
Oh, and in case you've never seen what Portal looks like here's a couple of photos to pique your interest.
In a post a few weeks back, I reported, in detail, about Tankard. The Germans are one of the most underrated bands in Metal. In the same vein, Mortal Sin never got the recognition they deserved. Most things from Australia are pretty shitty and gay, like kangaroos, koalas, INXS and Olivia Newton-John. But not these Aussies!
When we were a kids, my brother and I were limited musically to whatever records made it to South America's stores and whatever dubbed tapes we got from friends, who'd gotten them from their friends. Well, in a trip to the record store in the mall in '89 or so, we saw a Face of Despair record in the Rock section. At first I thought the band might be some shitty Christian rock, but when I turned the record around I realized these guys meant business. Metal business. White high-tops, ripped frosted denim jeans, sleeveless "Shut-up and Skate" T-shirt and Suicidal Tendencies-like bandanas? Damn, the temptation was too much. We bought the LP and played it as soon as we got home. We were not disappointed.
"Face of Despair" quickly became one of our favorite records. We never really got the cover, with the girl and the "SEX" neon sign and a syringe and the crucifix... I guess they were trying to make a deep point about girls and sex and health care in Australia. Whichever way, the music spoke for itself. The first song on side B, "Innocent Torture" opens with a rad sample of a judge sentencing someone to death. From there Mortal Sin rip a fucking awesome tune with awesome riffs that would make Tenacious D proud. The production on the record is not super clean and the guitar sound is a little whiney, but the that song is still one of my favorite thrash tracks of all time. The other tune in here that is bad-ass is "I Am Immortal". Here's a video from some TV show in the 1989. It might be in Australia, but I thought they only got electricity there in the late 90's...
So, here we were, in love with a band we knew nothing about and wanting more. We didn't even know where they were from. We'd have settled for any info at all, but what we had coming was more than we expected. Enter: the Peña Twins.
If it wasn't for Mortal Sin, the Peña Twins wouldn't be mentioned at all in our memoirs. The Twins used to ride bus #1 from school with us and got off on 140th Street, just below 7th Avenue. They were pretty annoying kids and were always getting in trouble, so my brother and I ignored them through the school year. That was only until one day, when one of them (the one with braces) asked me if I'd ever heard of Mortal Sin. "Fuck!", I thought, "how does this little shit know about OUR band?" Mortal Sin wasn't a band people were allowed to listen to without getting permission from us. After all, we'd discovered them. How did Peña Twin #1 know about them? How did he know anything about metal at all? Sure he wore high-tops and had a skater cut with a rat-tail, but he was far from being metal. They knew who Black Sabbath was and maybe even Metallica, but that was about it. My friends and I had a list of ALL metalheads in the school and the Peña Twins were NOT in it. I was shocked. Hiding my outrage, I told them I knew who they were. He then told me he had one of their records. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, this POSER has a Mortal Sin record?" Well, he probably bought it by mistake in the same record store we bought ours, I thought. "I can't remember what it's called, but the cover has a demon eating buildings" - "You must be mistaken, dude. That's not a demon, it's a little girl. And she's not eating shit, she's scared as hell!" He told me I was crazy and he'd bring the record to school the next day.
Originally released in '86 with the cover on the left and re-issued in '87 with the cover on the right.
"Fuck my ass!" or something like that, is what I thought the next day when I saw one of the Peña Twins holding "Mayhemic Destruction." I don't even know if it was the same Twin, but at that point I was more concerned with being one-uped by certified posers than analyzing the differences between these 2 genetic mutant freaks. My brother and I looked at each other in horror. We were both thinking the same thing: "Don't look surprised, we can't let them think they know more than we do." But they did. They had a Mortal Sin record we didn't! It was too much to bare, we had to compromise our metal integrity to listen to this record. I broke down and asked him to borrow it. "We already have it on tape, at home, of course" I lied, "but the tape is really old and you can hardly hear it." Wow! The sound was much rawer than I had expected. I realized while listening to it that it was their first record. It wasn't as Meliah Rage-ish as "Face...", it reminded me more of "Kill 'Em All" or "Ride The Lightning" Pretty goddam metal whatever it reminded me off. I made a tape of the record and returned it to the fucking Peña Twins. Fuck'em. Here's my favorite tune from that album, "Women In Leather".
It wasn't until 12 years later that I would finally own a copy of "Mayhemic (is that even a real word?) Destruction" I got a really nice Japanese pressing that I paid entirely too much money for. I also scored a 12" single called "Voyage Of The Disturbed" that the sold on tour in the US in '89.
My Mortal Sin vinyl collection today. The Peña Twins ain't got shit on me anymore!
So, I guess after "Face..." the Australians went the way of kangaroo shit. The have re-formed again and again, but it's not the same. One of the dudes put out a record in '91 under the name Mortal Sin and got sued quick-like. What a douche.
What a gay cover. No wonder he got sued.
A new record came out in '07, but the new line up is pretty pathetic and a few of them have advanced cases of Robb Flynn's Disease. It's very sad. See for yourself. The video starts off with no audio, but give it a second.
Anyway, here's to another underrated band that made the days of my youth worth living. Cheers, mates!
