I think it was Neil Kulkarni, reviewing the second full Wu-Tang release in Melody Maker, who concluded an admiring survey of the Clan’s ever-evolving group mythology with: “they’ve thought about this”. Certainly a large part of the appeal, to me, of GZA’s Liquid Swords lay in its ability to sustain the listener’s sense that its “stor[ies / from the real” came from a “real” far more expansively conceived than the factitious “materialism of sex and money” of the typical hip-hop playa fantasy. Liquid Swords is – in a good way – the sort of hip-hop album metallers tend to like: mordantly grandiose, curtly eloquent*. From its opening lines, “When the MCs came / to live out their name…”, it announces a world of dueling kingpins, vicious power struggles and mighty feats of arms. Yet it also denounces this world as the “cold world” of “babies dying, mothers crying and brothers getting shot”, a soured Valhalla where after the laughter inevitably come deadly tears. In this respect, it can be placed in a literary tradition of disenchanted epic that stretches back to Beowulf. The epic, mythic dimension, explicitly figured in the Wu’s Shaolin lore and the feverish conspiracy-theorizing of Wu-Tang Forever, is necessary in order for the disenchantment to register as an affect: a banal world (“There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”, which I would translate as “There Is No Alternative. Now stop whingeing and assume the position”) cannot become blackened or accursed.

It’s often assumed that the fantasy/swords-and-sorcery elements of metal are puerile escapist fantasy – slay Morgoth, wield ring of power, cop off with elf princess etc. – but that’s only really true of false metal, just as only false hip-hop celebrates the hustler lifestyle without remarking the skull beneath the skin. The real dynamic, as I’ve just suggested, is one in which a heroic world is constructed as a backdrop against which the dishonourable violence, betrayal and disappointment of “the real” can be discerned. What, if anything, is “adolescent” about this is precisely the insistence that the world can be judged, that “the way of the world” is scandalous and unacceptable – and this adolescent militancy is of course what Cold World is about.

In a recent interview, Portal’s Illogium declares that “we are inventing a band that we can worship ourselves”, and the resulting invention makes me want to echo Kulkarni’s praise of the Wu: they’ve thought about this. By way of illustration, here’s a recent performance of “Black Houses”:

You’ll have gathered that there’s a clock-headed man in an asymmetric suit and what look like diving gloves, bellowing ominously over a curdled cacophony of detuned, tremelo-picked, atonal riffs. You might (might) be forgiven for not being able to discern what he’s bellowing. Here are the lyrics:

In addition to their compelling horror-aesthetic and formidable stage presence, Portal have a tremendous line in ominous nonsense-phrases and made-up words. My favourite of all is a song title: “Glumurphonel”. I have memories, very probably false, of a children’s television program in which there was a music box called a “glumophone”, which emitted sad tuba-farping noises that made everybody who heard them feel very sorry for themselves. It may have been the possession of a wicked witch; I’m not certain I’m not just making this up. Anyway, the glumophone was clearly a diabolical sonic-affect weapon, capable of making not only people (or Moomins, or whatever) sad but of infecting everything around it with gloomy down-in-the-dumpsiness: flowers would wilt and and shed their petals, milk would curdle, table legs would become wobbly and teapots dribblesome. You get the picture. I can’t tell you quite why “glumurphonel” is even glummer and eerier than “glumophone”, but I hope you’ll agree that it is.

It seems to me that Portal are all about transcendental abomination: symbolic disorder, the profanation or “butchering open” of human cognitive categories by the intrusion of a wholly alien intelligence. They are beyond “death metal”: perhaps “druj metal” would be a better term. Here, in any case, is a band who have really learned from Lovecraft.

* This probably makes it sound more like Geoffrey Hill than it actually is.

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