ALBUM REVIEW: We Are Always Alone – Portrayal Of Guilt
PORTRAYAL OF GUILT are a gift from the gods for any fan of extreme music. Combining screamo, black metal, powerviolence, noise and just about every other ugly and grim subgenre, the Austin, Texas quartet are an absolute gem of a band. Their sound is wholly their own, more polished than their screamo forebears, more eclectic than most extreme metal and more emotionally searing, both conceptually and formally, than the majority of other heavy music. In short; they’re awesome, and their newest album We Are Always Alone only further cements their brilliance.
The one-two punch of lead singles It’s Already Over and Masochistic Oath are perhaps the key tracks on We Are Always Alone, and the moments where PORTRAYAL OF GUILT sound most singularly their own. They ebb and flow, shifting their dynamics and smoothly transitioning between the comparable delicacy of It’s Already Over into the scarily intense Masochistic Oath. It comes as no surprise that these tracks were released with an accompanying short horror film as a video. The opening chords of both tracks, along with the strings that close Garden of Despair, ring with a creepiness that recalls iconic horror soundtracks like Bernard Hermann’s Psycho or John Carpenter’s Halloween.
There’s an effortless quality to PORTRAYAL OF GUILT craft, one that can only arise from the most fine-tuned and razor-sharp group of musicians. The ten tracks on We Are Always Alone have been almost entirely stripped of conventional structure, leaving them to move and progress intuitively, as if the songs themselves are guiding the musicians. Impressively, perhaps due to the white-hot succinctness of the compositions, the individual musicianship of the respective members of PORTRAYAL OF GUILT really manages to stand out, particularly that of drummer James Beveridge. His fluid patterns and transitions between delicacy and ferocity on A Tempting Pain and Garden of Despair belie the intricate chaos of these wild, turbulent songs.
Crucially, PORTRAYAL OF GUILT inject these ten nightmares with a heady dose of psychological despair. There’s a strong, well-thought out psycho-geography to the album, They Want Us All To Suffer ends with these thuds of bass that stamp like a seizure, Anesthetized closes with an eerie rumble as if the track is brooding in some dark, dark place. The form of the compositions mirror the thematics, which, as the lyrics and track titles reveal, come from a severely damaged headspace. In particular, the lyrics of It’s Already Over, which are narrated from the view of someone suffering an awful depression, are especially heavy and borderline upsetting; “pill after pill, I prepare myself for the morning ahead, my body folds, writhing in pain, no one is here for me.”
An emotional tempest of an album, We Are Always Alone is PORTRAYAL OF GUILT’s finest work so far, one layered with simple but smart adornments of noise and brooding darkness that creep around the tracks’ edges, infecting their headspaces and the ours in turn. PORTRAYAL OF GUILT are special, and their savagery goes beyond mere nihilism, becoming something genuinely sad and despairing. However this journey into a personal hell is one wild ride, and deserves to be heard by anyone even remotely interested in the darker corners of the musical spectrum.
Rating: 9/10
We Are Always Alone is set for release January 29th via Closed Casket Activities.
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