Band:	Xasthur
Album:	Portal Of Sorrow
Style:	Depressive black metal
Release date:	March 26, 2010
Guest review by:	Slayer666

01. Portal Of Sorrow
02. Broken Glass Christening
03. Shrine Of Failure
04. Stream Of Subconsciousness
05. Karma/Death
06. Horizon Of Plastic Caskets
07. Mesmerized By Misery
08. This Abyss Holds The Mirror
09. Mourning Tomorrow
10. Miscarriage Of The Soul
11. Obeyer's Of Their Own Deaths
12. Released From This Earth
13. The Darkest Light
14. Hiver De Glace

If there is one thing that I really like about the US, it's their black metal underground which has been simply blooming in the past few years. Xasthur is the project that introduced me to it, and pretty much remained my favorite act. Yet, ever since Malefic made it known that Xasthur will disband, there has been a tiny hole in my heart, one that I had thought would disappear once I heard his final opus, an album I assumed would shake me to the core. I was wrong. Portal of Sorrow makes for a clumsy, uninspired retreat from the scene by a once great band, with a few gems buried in the mud.

Xasthur's entire work can be described as 15 years of Malefic waging war on himself. It's depressive suicidal black metal bent on making you understand how small, irrelevant and pointless your existence is, how completely worthless everything you've ever done or been through is. All Reflections Drained made a shift in style, merging black metal with drone and ambient, whereas Portal of Sorrow continues and expands upon this sound and hardly makes it work.

To start with the musicianship itself, it's sorely lacking. Xasthur has never been a technical band, and part of its charm is precisely the sloppy performance making the sound ever more unnerving and vile, but this is too much. The drums sound particularly amateurish, even off-tempo some of the time; the guitars also contain a number of mistakes and missed notes. Haters of black metal say that the reason these bands use such extremely low-fi production is to hide their lack of skill, and Portal of Sorrow proves them partially right.

As for the emotional impact, which is where Xasthur used to shine, there is much left to be desired. A few tracks could easily be called some of the finest Malefic has ever written, but the majority of the album is simply boring droning. Eerie organs, muffled female choirs and Malefic's distant, tortured screams help build the atmosphere to the point of walking through a realistic nightmare in some tracks, whereas just sounding unfitting and cheesy in some others. For the most part, the album feels too long, lacking dynamics and proper build-ups to climaxes, instead simply droning on and going nowhere. If someone ever told me that Xasthur would sound like a bad soundtrack to a cheap, old horror movie called "Creepy Ghost in a Creepy Haunted Mansion", I would have laughed at his stupid ass. Turns out I'm the stupid one after all.

It's a bleeding shame what Malefic did here. This style has lots of potential, the prime example being "Stream of Subconsciousness", a track that sounds like someone turned a hazy nightmare into a song, or "Karma/Death", a shining gem in Xasthur's discography, a perfect swan-song to tell us all "good-bye". The problem with this album is that it sounds like Malefic had an awesome idea for a few tracks, which would have made a mind-blowing EP, but then decided to make an entire album in a similar vein, with very little inspiration.