ALBUM REVIEW: …Beginning Of The End – Portrayal Of Guilt

PORTRAYAL OF GUILT have continuously shown a disregard for genre convention and being pigeonholed. Their last record, 2023’s Devil Music, saw the band contorting screamo, black metal, and sludge into unrecognisable shapes on the album’s first half, and then reprising these songs in the album’s second half with chilling chamber string arrangements. On their latest, …Beginning Of The End, the band swirls and meshes genres and sounds with wild abandon, maintaining a thrillingly evil atmosphere while keeping things consistently fresh.

There is a slippery slope with this type of genre blending to slip into novelty or, at the very least, lack of cohesiveness. However, PORTRAYAL OF GUILT maintain a sinister tone held together by the focal point of frontman and guitarist Matt King’s sinister raspy vocals. While the guitars switch from dissonant to melodic, the drums from pounding to fluttering, the bass from grinding to chugging, King’s vile vocalisations provide an anchor, a true figurehead maintaining cohesion through his identifiable tone amid the chaos.

Human Terror weds eerie filtered guitar on the verses with a menacing nu-metal bounce on the chorus. The track gives a good taste of the album’s overall production – grimy, yet defined enough that every instrument stands apart clearly. This sort of paradoxical marriage of the unwieldy and the precise is what lends this record its credibility. For all of the seemingly at-odds ideas at play, there is a professionalism and clear curatorial taste to the way they come together. The song is surprisingly catchy despite its extremity, with its bellowed refrains pairing well with the jumpy chorus riff to leave an impression far after it’s over.

Under Siege pounds forward at a brisk clip with a punk drumbeat as King shreds his throat above the squall. There’s some SLAYER-esque lead guitar shredding, multiple drum switch ups, and what sounds like the antithesis of a metalcore breakdown at the end; King spits out a punctuated sound of disgust that would normally signify a slamming barrage of guitars and drums, but instead, the drums pound on as a semi-distorted, cavernous riff echoes over empty space. It’s an eerie subversion to an overdone formula, and a true standout moment in an album brimming with surprises. The track abruptly cuts off with a droning synth before a distorted drum break carries it into Ecstasy, a curveball that brings in dissonant lead guitars over an almost trip-hop groove, before the chorus dissolves the lockstep into a hazy, industrial chorus where King’s feral bark melts into a defeated murmur. The unlikely merging of these late 90s styles really shouldn’t go over well as it does, and there’s a troubling dissonance to these disparate sounds forming into a shambling amalgamation, but it’s exactly this ugliness that gives this record so much distinct personality. 

The queasy, reverberated guitars on the verses and muscular riffs sported on the chorus of Death From Above feel drawn directly from former collaborator and noise rock brethren CHAT PILE, but King pulls back on the high shrieks and lowers his tone on the gurgling chorus, switching to drawling spoken word on the chilling verses, adding some unique flair to the sound. 

The praise lay on King is not to discredit the dynamic and subtle drumming of James Beveridge or the gnarled basswork of Alex Stanfield, throughout this track and the rest of the album, the three work to push out the hideous beasts they’ve unnaturally bred into existence. King is often the standout, but in the moments where his vocals and riffs aren’t centre stage, Beveridge pulls off some nasty China cymbal hammering, clever groove switch-ups, and surprising bursts of energy, and Stanfield provides a consistent pulse to anchor the band’s disparate concoctions. 

Not every experiment goes off without a hitch. As intriguing as the choice to feature Houston rapper and RAIDER KLAN affiliate SLIM GUERILLA on Chamber of Misery Part IV is, and as surprisingly well as his Southern-flavored flows go with the noisy guitars, the track is too short to be anything more than an interesting experiment. We would have loved to see this concept fleshed out more, as it could have proved a uniquely thrilling fusion of noise rock and rap, and it’s one of the few moments on the record where the band left me wanting a little more. 

The end of the record picks up from this slight stumble. Object Of Pain’s sneering chorus “I wanna feel you on the inside / I wanna feel you on the outside” is a tasteful nod to NINE INCH NAILS, and King’s return to clean vocals is surprisingly refreshing after being bludgeoned with his guttural shrieks for most of the album. The closer, The Last Judgment, feels fittingly final, opening with pummelling black metal and concluding the same, all while indulging in drum and bass, doomy guitars, and climactic lead melodies in the middle. It closes the book on an album brimming with creativity and shows the band firing on all cylinders until the last second.

With how often it is easy to categorise and label bands in the metal scene, it’s intriguing to see PORTRAYAL OF GUILT playing with these conventions and flipping them on their head, all the while forging a brutal and despairing thesis of darkness. They’ve long been putting out interesting and creative music, and it’s time they get their flowers. …Beginning of the End is a fitting title, as this album sounds like an ending; an end of categorisation, and end to preconceived notions, and, sonically, the end of the world. 

Rating: 8/10

…Beginning of the End is out now via Run For Cover Records. 

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