PORTALS FESTIVAL THE DOME, LONDON
illed as a weekend of experimental rock, Portals Festival allows techy aficionados to disappear down the rabbit hole and get lost in math and post-rock’s idiosyncrasies. Sunday’s line-up is peppered with a smorgasbord of heaviness, although death gospel queen kicks things off, proving you don’t need riffs that can crush buildings to be ‘brutal’. As she strikes the first hushed tones of , it creates a dark atmosphere so thick, it seems to suck all the air out of the room. Compared to the other acts appearing over the weekend who aim to cram a million notes into one mind-bending chorus, A.A. excels at playing with dark yawning spaces that threaten to blow up and swallow you whole. admit they’re fighting the mother of all hangovers but you’d never know it from the way they navigate every twist and hairpin turn of their instrumental, demented rhythms. The Brighton trio defy genres: they could be math, they could be prog and there’s a generous dollop of psychedelic synapse-frying going on, but and a thundering make you realise how unimportant those labels are. The bass on shakes the floor of The Dome to such an extent that by the end, our intestines have shrivelled up and been drawn down Poly-Math’s Technicolor wormhole. Post-metallers are the heaviest band playing across the festival by some way. As opener rumbles into life like a dormant volcano waking from a deep and dangerous slumber, heads bang in hypnotic unison. Over the course of their set, the Londoners immerse the room in a thick layer of crushing, molten sludge, awash with cinematic dynamics, piquing our excitement for the upcoming follow-up to 2017’s excellent .
