Stand out tracks: Transcending a Mere Multiverse, Vessel of Balon, Tempus Fugit

What we have here is Portals first big release, 'Seepia'.

I first saw Portal at Bloodlust '03 and remember laughing at the Curator wearing an ultra massive wizards hat that covered his whole head from the shoulders up. Looking at the rest of the band wearing executioner hoods and dressed in business suits made me laugh harder.

Then they started playing their set and my mouth opened even wider, but I was no longer laughing. They unleashed upon me the most devastatingly fast and technical metal I have ever seen. For those with the Cannibal Corpse Wretched Spawn DVD, think 'Frantic Disembowelment' being played about 400 billion times faster.

Admittedly at first I dismissed it as pure noise. Then my ears tuned into their extremely ugly guitar sound and I was flabbergasted that they could play so fast. I had to get 'Seepia'. Playing it was like a bitch slap in the face of my so called 'Technical Death Metal' bands such as Dying Fetus, Cephalic Carnage and Necrophagist.

Let me try to do this band justice and prepare you for the onslaught of noise which lies on 'Seepia'. The guitar tone is extremely ugly and has a snarl to it. The riffs seem like random notes played extremely fast, so fast that upon first listen you will probably dismiss it as noisecore or something like that. But then you realise that there are actually riffs there and you won't believe your ears. The drums are brutal and blasting, the vocals are average raspy Death/Black.

So how do I know that this isn't just noise? Well watching over the Bloodlust 03 DVD shows the guitarists hands are all over the board at such a remarkable speed it's like watching a hummingbird flapping over the strings. So you say now "So what, thats how Anal Cunt make their songs, random notes all over the board." But then you listen to 'Seepia' and hear the exact same notes in the exact same order being reproduced and you think "How the fuck can they memorise and play this shit?". It's totally mind bending. To hear atonal mess on a CD and then to see that exact atonal mess being played in a memorised and specific order, is quite astounding.

It's all brutal and mind crushing shit, and with slight underproducing you'll have trouble trying to decipher some of it. But persevere and you'll come to realise that this is a masterpiece in psychotic precision and technicality.