Critical success was a no-win situation with Xasthur: “basement black metal” is a hard thing for the uninitiated to get into, much less keep up with. It’s harsh, challenging, unlistenable, and is often created by immensely prolific misanthropes with no use for quality control. It’s hard to find a way in, and even if you do find one, it’s even harder to expand your knowledge from there. So that’s exactly what the metal media did: they popped mega-huge critical boners for a few Xasthur releases (2006’s Subliminal Genocide in particular), and then, like they do with most bands, got bored and stopped paying attention. And this didn’t stop the band (well, the guy) from making and releasing more albums, splits, demos, and what-have-you. So when the band/guy decided to abruptly call it quits last year, they went out with a whimper instead of a bang (well, a muffled, tortured bang). The sense that mainman Malefic seemed to give in his statements were that he was as tired of the band as the media were, and while Xasthur did (and do) mean a lot to me, the possibility that Scott Conner (the dude’s real name) has found some sort of sanity or happiness in his life, and that said happiness means he doesn’t have to make suffocatingly bleak funereal black metal anymore, is a strangely heartwarming one. Xasthur’s music always sounded as thought it were made by someone at the end of his rope, so it was good to hear that maybe that’s no longer the case.
It’s interesting, then, to hear that last year’s Portal of Sorrow is an anomaly in the Xasthur catalog. It’s the band (fleshed out with some guest musicians, thus actually almost warranting being called “a band”) at its most expansive, perhaps even to the point where the Xasthur concept begins to collapse in on itself. The classic Xasthur sound is still here — the woozy wall of untuned guitars and that sickly haze of synthesizer s– but is filled out with female vocals and Malefic’s improved drumming (a welcome sound after it killed any kind of forward momentum on 2007’s Defective Epitaph). After a decade of meandering in the basement, Portal of Sorrow hints at the prospect of looking out the window, if not actually venturing outside. Of course, violent introspection and isolation were the band’s lifeblood, and thus the idea of the outside world is Xasthur’s flashpoint. The album as a swan song is both disappointing in that it’s an endpoint in terms of potential, and fascinating in that it serves as a statement of the band’s progression throughout more than two dozen releases. In a lot of ways, it may be their most easily digestible album (which, for some, equates it with being its worst), which for a band so obsessed with suffering and anger, is about as close to a happy ending as the Xasthur catalog could come.
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