How about this: “Like Portal, but not as awesome.” Or: “Portal’s long lost cousins, but not as awesome.” That might work.
It’s a tall order to touch Portal’s sheer awesomeness and their utterly warped and fucked-up Swarth album from earlier this year, but credit Impetuous Ritual for at least trying to follow in the Aussie’s footsteps. And sure enough, some members of Portal do time in Impetuous Ritual. Talk about taking your work home with you…
Anyway, Relentless Execution Of Ceremonial Excrescence has no semblance of structure to it, which is natural considering the bowels-from-hell inducing strands of “Elegy” and the murmuring, rumbling album closer “Dirge.” That near-indecipherable sonic cage that Portal constructed is on full display here, albeit with a less dense production job and a slightly more retro death metal angle, something that Portal wants nothing to do with.
With two bands of this ilk on the Profound Lore roster, it will be interesting to see who else wants to crash the party. As identifiable as Portal’s sound has become, one has to think someone else (on a larger label, probably) will come along and totally ape and ruin it. Impetuous Ritual do their fair share of aping on Relentless Execution Of Ceremonial Excrescence, but they’re not even close to sullying Portal’s totally fucked-up sonic exploits.
(This content originally appeared on Blistering.com)