REVIEW: Element by Portal (FREE mp3 download)
Portal, this up and coming band, is right up there with Tool, Dredg, and Nine Inch Nails. Definitely all awesome tracks here with truly outstanding production. Very clean, crisp sound. The track order is great as the album gets stronger with each song.
My favorite tracks are "The Paradigm" and "With You" by far. I especially loved the intro to "With You" that acts as the perfect bridge from "The Paradigm." It's a perfect example of what Tool does so well: soft interludes in between the heavy riffs which makes the hard rock so much more powerful. That soft/loud skill is well mastered here.
The vocals are awesome because they sound unlike any other band I've listened to. They are meticulously enunciated so I can actually understand the lyrics and get some cool imagery going. I'd have to parallel the vocals to poetry reading as the words ride smack next to the instrumental rhythm.
Overall, I'm very glad I bought this album. With that said, I have some suggestions on how I would like Portal even more. Although the vocals are awesome and original, they seem restricted to the intellectual realm. Because the vocals are kept so close to the rhythm, with a 1-to-1 relationship between syllables and beats, they don't achieve that emotional crescendo that Maynard does so well with Tool. Listening to these songs gets me pumped but that emotion builds and doesn't get to erupt like it does on Tool's song "Undertow." Part of it is a desire to hear a slightly higher octave of vocals, and part of it is a desire to simply hear the lyrics bust out of the syllabic scheme because the emotion can't be contained any longer.
As for the guitars, drums, and keyboards: very awesome stuff. The only weaker area I detected was occasional predictability. By that I mean when the listener can out think the pace of the song and already knows exactly what notes/beats are coming. For example Tool and Dream Theater are great at putting a little variance throughout their songs, whether its a few extra drum beats, a quick guitar twang, or a vocal note taken low instead of high, etc. "With You" does better with this towards the end. I don't mean to say the mix isn't complex enough because there's some really great mixing here (especially on "A Cleansing Breath"). Rather, I'd just like a few more surprises rather than purely identical repetitions of the chorus/melody.
Lastly, I'll just gripe about the bang-for-the-buck. I'm not a big fan of live tracks nor of remixes. But I was very pleased to have Insurgent Few on this disc and I really enjoyed the electronica sounds in the remixes (particularly the Kiyami Mutation of "Remnants"). My qualm, though, is for a full album price of $12, I'm not satisfied with hearing remixes of the same songs. I'd want to hear at least 10 original songs to pay a full album price (and yes, full albums never cost more than $12-14 if you shop online; I've never paid that ridiculous tag price of $19 that many music stores charge). Maybe one or two remixes would be cool, but if there's more than that there should be a seperate album in my opinion. Now I don't pretend to be a music expert, so I don't mean to put down all the hard work that went into this album. They're all just ideas on possible areas to sound even more incredible. I just love this music so much I'd love to see a major label mainstream release on store shelves as soon as possible.
Listen to the CD HERE!
FREE downloadable MP3s from their earlier releases HERE!
