Boston Experimental Metal duo, Porno Portal to Florida, deliver a carefully controlled heavy-metal funeral dirge on their self-titled EP released December 15th 2017.
They careen their way through a 7 song crash-course of frenetic, technical shredding, sludgey breakdowns, and thunderous riffs. There is an unbridled intensity in their dynamics, with a precision to match their extreme volumes, and an earnest righteousness in the proletarian indignation directed at the ethical ugliness of everyday life; PPTF is not a band for the faint of heart.
Almeida is a real heavy hitter on the trap kit and pulls no punches, matching Luna’s dexterity at every turn. Together, the two put up a thick wall of sound, fluidly becoming interlaced in syncopated call and response. She plays as loud as she does fast. To consider that she is also screaming at the top of her lungs while drumming just makes it even more bad ass. There is melody in Luna’s guitar playing, but the tunes are not sweet. They are dissonant, melancholic, and pissed-off in nature. Heavily-taxed, minimum-wage, dead-end jobs, in 2018 PPTF create a world where music is really the only option for the disenfranchised, the illiterate, the instant refugees, society’s scapegoats. The guitar riffs in PPTF are dark; they embody a restlessness and unease that’s ever more at the heart of the American psyche.
Joseph Luna (guitars) and Joanne Almeida (drums) are dedicated instrumentalists, & demonstrate airtight musical coordination, starting and stopping on a dime together, shifting tempos and riffs seamlessly, carving out a space for the next eruption of sound with odd, angular interludes, or periods of unusually regular strumming and drumming. All of this is counter-balanced by a dizzying blitz of math-y brutality, a measured dose of sudden angst.
Speak-singing, shouting, yelling, screaming like banshees, but never defaulting to the hackneyed Cookie Monster “death growl”, Luna and Almeida share vocal duties on every song, intertwining their verbal and musical scorn for our greedy society gone mad, a runaway wrecking-ball defiling then destroying everything, everyone, and every eco-system in its path. They paint portraits of the accelerating vicissitudes, rude absurdities, and shallow corporate meaninglessness contaminating 99% of our lives, under late-stage disaster-capitalism run amok. PPTF brews a succinct, poetic lemonade out of some awfully dark matters: the unsavory moral compromises some of us must strike in order to keep a job and make the rent, like “how much intolerance should you tolerate from your bigoted-ass co-worker?”; the contempt for the bourgeoise, both petite and grand, felt by the oppressed worker who commutes by city bus and cannot ever afford to take a real vacation.
There is a palpable contempt for consumerism in this music, and even for the crime of complicity in the capitalist rat-race as a prelude to corporate feudalism. This isn’t a human race, we’re all just racing the clock, and we’d all last a whole lot longer if we cooperated instead of competing. Else, we’ll all wind up drowned in an ocean of each other’s blood, as the record cover suggests.
