We North American metallers are used to getting boned when it comes to metal festivals. Yeah, we’ve got a handful of great fests, but the events are almost always pretty small and localized (barring the mighty Maryland Death Fest, which routinely attracts diehards from all over the world). The North American idea of a “metal fest” has, on a mainstream level at least, devolved into lumbering advertisements for metalcore albums and hoary old dinosaurs’ reunion tours. Wacken has rapidly become something similar, but this year’s edition still has Morbid Angel, Sodom, and Tsjuder on the bill. What do we get? Vince and Axl will scold me if I name any names, but there are a staggering array of shitty mega-shows coming up this summer – and they sure as hell won’t be booking Mayhem. We don’t have a Wacken, a Hellfest, a Roadburn; hell, we can barely manage one killer large-scale multi-day fest a year, but as always, the devil’s in the details, and what we lack in quantity, we’re rapidly starting to atone for in quality.

Case in point: this year’s Rites of Darkness III fest. Past years have welcomed the likes of Impiety, Diocletian, Blasphemophagher Cruciamentum, and Morbosidad to our cursed shores, and this year’s lineup is shaping up to be an absolute massacre of a weekend.

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Australia, for those of us in the US, is pretty much literally on the other side of the world, and, like good Americans, we pick and choose what we want to know about it. The continent conjures up images of free range marsupials, shrimps and barbies with some throwing somewhere in there, Paul Hogan, and how, despite speaking English like us, “Fosters” is Australian for “beer” (and also terrible). If you’re a metal fan, AC/DC will come to mind, maybe blackened thrashers Destroyer 666, MAYBE moody basement black metal one-man project Striborg, and perhaps technical death upstarts Psycroptic (which would be inaccurate, as they’re from New Zealand). With an exception of AC/DC, though, they’re mostly bands that are proficient playing a Western/Northwestern hemisphere style, sometimes with slight tweaks to its DNA. A sound uniquely theirs, though, comes to mind when talking about “ambient death metal” titans Portal and their (relatively) straightforward side project Impetuous Ritual.

When it comes to death metal’s hallmarks – technical prowess, shocking gore-themed content, brutal riffs aplenty – they seem to be unraveling them and playing with the stuffing inside, reconstructing the genre into a truly unnerving and horrifying new beast altogether. Listening to Tomb of the Mutilated or Altars of Madness, then listening to Impetuous Ritual’s debut, Relentless Execution of Ceremonial Excrescence, and, especially, Portal’s new album, Swarth, leaves one thinking they couldn’t be any more foreign to what we know as death metal, just as their homeland couldn’t be any further south without being Antarctica. Suicide Silence and Oceano are a world away from this, and when modern death metal and deathcore are running the risk of becoming completely sterile and interchangeable, there couldn’t be a better circumstance.

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