With 2021’s Christfucker, Austin, Texas-based Portrayal of Guilt honed the eclecticism hinted at in earlier releases. While sustaining an elegantly ferocious stance, the band made use of chamber-leaning sparseness, punk-inflected riffs, new-wave licks, and dynamic rhythmic shifts. Singer (and guitarist) Matt King demonstrated a gift for nuance, veering tonally from unbridled aggression to profound despair. The album, landing squarely in the metal realm, also expanded the genre.
With their subsequent LP, 2023’s Devil Music, PoG retreated a bit into the more singular playbook of their first two albums, though still exhibiting sonic versatility and emotional bandwidth, including string-accompaniments on the album’s second half. Lyrically, King revisited the perennial themes of toxic conditioning, estrangement from nature, and how glaring inequities are inherent to governments, religion, and social structures.
With their new album, …Beginning of the End, PoG return to the MO defined via Christfucker, moving nimbly between assorted mixes and timbres. Vocally, King navigates clarities and confusions, assertions and laments. Mostly adhering to a lycanthropic growl, he also experiments committedly with a cleaner, though still sullen, singing voice. As a whole, the album reaffirms PoG’s metal stance and Hobbesian view, even as the band continue to draw from and integrate diverse approaches.
From the opening track, the one-minute “Backstabber”, the band forge notable hybridizations. A sludgy riff emanates from a wiry, flanger-soaked guitar, conjuring creepy rituals performed in a mosquito swamp. This succinct but illustrative intro segues into “Human Terror”, built around bad-trip atmospherics and Alex Stanfield’s crunchy bass part. King embodies Milton’s Lucifer clambering out of a pit to wreak havoc on whoever and whatever crosses his path. The album’s lyrical tone is established courtesy of his opening lines: “Plagued by vile sickness / in an endless cycle of grief”. If you’re hoping for a redemptive tilt, you’re definitely in the wrong neighborhood.
With “Heaven’s Gate”, the band dive into cacophony. Stanfield’s bass part could’ve been plucked from Nirvana’s Bleach and run through a malignancy pedal. James Beveridge’s drums sound like juggernauts stomping through a metropolis. King shrieks over the noxious welter, a radioactive war survivor or lab subject emerging to exact revenge on a hypocritical and consumeristic world.
“Under Siege” and “Ecstasy” further the noisy onslaught. On the former, King’s guitar threads through Beveridge’s adrenalized drumming; his vocal resembles a vampire spewing curses while being cemented into a wall. The latter features a melodic and echoey guitar part. On the chorus, King adopts a less snarly yet broody vocal a la “My Immolation” from 2021’s We Are Always Alone. With the concise “Chamber of Misery Pt. IV”, on the other hand, Slim Guerilla’s rap vignette is framed by a moody and reverb-doused mix, bringing to mind Paris, Texas’s Boy Anonymous or a late-night collaborative outtake spearheaded by Dean Vong.
The band intently explore the use of clean-ish vocals on “God Will Never Hear Me”, the intro filled with guest Jenna Rose’s sighs and whispers (a very different contribution than her part on Christfucker’s “Sadist”, where she matched King’s screams with her own higher-pitched and slightly thinner shrieks). Soon enough, King grabs the mic and assumes rabid-lupine mode. Toward the end of the song, Rose’s softer moans and King’s corrosive growls are interweaved. “Object of Pain”, meanwhile, shows King using clearly articulated vocals throughout the song. His chorus/mantra – “I want to feel you from the inside / I want to feel you from the outside” – obviously and presumably intentionally references Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer”.
“Nerves of corroded wire hold this body together”, King sneers on “Death from Above”, capturing the essence of anxiety. Even angels “salivate over [his] unsealed wounds”, meaning: these aren’t the benevolent, downy-winged beings we learned about in Sunday School. If life on earth is filled with misery, conditions aren’t much better in the so-called holy realm. Guitars on closer “The Last Judgment” oscillate between jackhammer riffs and gossamer arpeggios. King gives his best demon-soaked-in-acid performance: vitriol, rage, hints of bloody catharsis.
As Radiohead are at their sublimest when Thom Yorke’s ethereal vocal is contrasted with the band’s more electronic/mechanistic rhythms and textures, so PoG are most distinct when King’s vocal savagery is juxtaposed with austere, if still solemn and weighty, and frequently innovative, instrumentation. …Beginning of the End, like earlier albums, spotlights the trio as they persist in their mission to heterogenize trample-and-roar metal, reemploying the tried-and-true while scratching in the dust for new possibilities.
