Australia is the most evil fucking place on earth.

Portal

Australia is a very scary place. Perhaps not for those whom have spent most of their lives there and have adapted to survive in or become a part of the many dangers that the country has to offer, but for a brittle-boned Irish part-time alcoholic with tender flesh and a thin emotional membrane like myself, moving there could only mean certain doom. The threat of stone melting heatwaves, bloated alcohol prices and with just about every living animal containing some variant of deadly poison...my death notice would be written on a one-way Aer Lingus ticket and funeral arrangements would be tended to upon my arrival. It's basically Mordor with koala babies.

Luckily (unluckily?) I'm one of the true Irish patriots that decided to go down with the ship and though I may have little to no prospects regarding employment for the foreseeable future, at least I'm not being chewed on by a T-bone steak sized tarantula in chainmail. That's always a good thing.

Though violent crime rates are relatively low in Oz, the elements themselves are hazardous enough to make up for the lack of stabby-stabby, rapey-rapey. However, that's not enough to calm my turbulent nerves, for there is a greater insidious evil that creeps, lurks and stalks in the land down under. That evil is the Australian metal scene. A circle of robed, spiked and hooded death metal ghouls that makes the Norwegian black circle look like a Mormon childcare center.

It seems as though some of these Australian warmongers and sorcerers decided long ago to scrape off any kind of groove, beat, rhythm or any of those terms usually associated with music and replace them with 100%, undiluted evil. These bands are not Metallica. They are not Slayer. They aren't Cannibal Corpse, Napalm Death, Mayhem or Emperor. They have managed to tear the flesh from heavy metal, all the way down to the bone. There is no warmth in this music, no headbanging, no beer-swilling. The late and great Euronymous of Mayhem once referred to Swedish experimental loonatics Abruptum as "the audial essence of pure black evil". Had Euronymous not been left in a heap with more holes than a saltshaker, it would be interesting to hear what he'd have to say about these Aussie hellions.

One more note to mention; all three bands share some of the same fucking musicians. If ever there was a "black circle", this is where you'd find it.

Portal - Omnipotent Crawling Chaos

When referring to Australian death metal, even death metal in general if you are so inclined, you cannot start a sentence without first talking about Portal. This band and its members are perhaps the very heart and soul of this movement, which pushes the boundaries and blurs the lines of what metal is and isn't. There's jazz, there's unrelenting and crushing tone and most importantly there is unsettling atmosphere. Portal are one of those bands that come around every so often that manage to dig their fingernails right into your cerebral tissue and leave you either smitten or scarred for life. There is no warmth in this music whatsoever. Portal are the soundtrack to epistemology, madness and the unknown.

Initiation: Outre' (2007)

Impetuous Ritual - Inexorable Blasphemies

Only members of Portal could produce something even more terrifying than Portal. Impetuous Ritual are every bit as dark, brooding and celestial as their mother band, but there is a certain level of energy and aggression in the music that isn't present in Portal. There's something more here that cannot be easily explained. Whereas Portal weave desolate and alien landscapes with their music, Impetuous Ritual rely on a slightly more traditional framework of speed and assault. Though the similarities between both bands are obvious, considering they're essentially composed of the same musicians, there is an obnoxiousness and violence to Impetuous Ritual that gives them independence from their better-known counterpart.

Initiation: Relentless Execution of Ceremonial Excrescence (2009)

Grave Upheaval - 4

I could use a lot of the same adjectives to describe Grave Upheaval as I have Portal and Impetuous Ritual, but even those are just words and simply do not do justice to how horrifying this band sounds. In fact, that's the only adjective suitable for a band like Grave Upheaval. We could talk about musicianship, production value, themes and recent releases, but none of that even begins to describe the wicked drones that this band conjures. "Horror" is the only adjective needed. They are the sound of ageless tombs and pure cosmic horror.

Initiation: Untitled (2013)

****