Porta Nigra – Weltende Review

[Cover art: Aufruhr (1899) by Käthe Kollwitz]

Anyone who has traversed the gates of black metal understands how powerfully it pulls from the past. It’s so often a necrotic art, breathing dark romanticism into corpses long since buried deep beneath the earth, reviving them into some sort of twisted state of undeath: Dead’s depraved poetry with Mayhem, the Viking call of Enslaved, or the revival of the 80s underground via the metalphysical ouroboros of Darkthrone.

World War I is far from a new thematic concept in heavy metal, hell, Motörhead’s 1916 pulled a vulnerable side out of Lemmy on its eponymous closing track that he really only touched on once in his career. It’s not hard to imagine the brave little tear taking a detour around his mole as it marches its trail over the toughened battle-worn skin of his face while the weathered rocker croons from the perspective of a young nameless soldier’s journey to senseless slaughter. However, as The Great War’s centennial approached and the gravesoil ripened, extreme metal began to take a notably keen interest in the conflict. Minenwerfer threw their listeners into a Jünger-like, first-person experience of the various fronts, Sacriphyx gave a uniquely Australian perspective, Ares Kingdom lended their already artillery-like assault to the trenches with 2015’s The Unburiable Dead.

Germany’s Porta Nigra aren’t strictly a World War I-themed band, overall they seem more fascinated with the period itself–the fin de siècle and where it leads through their warped black lense. On Weltende, the fourth album in their discography and second to tackle The Great War directly (the first being 2015’s Kaiserschnitt), the band go for a more stripped down approach than 2020’s more sonically experimental Schöpfungswut. The sleek sound wizardy is still there however, as evidenced by the manipulated echos of the introduction track that gives way to a technical-but-melodic blast of cold Immortal winds. Ethereal synths and emotive solos wail of humanity over the primitive mechanicality of the drums. Coupled with the cold delay on the vocals, Porta Nigra’s sound is evoking a primitive industrial feel that reeks of the machine-leveling-man aspect that made the First World War such a senseless bloodbath.

The riffs speak of tech-thrash riff salad–the hooks aren’t the most memorable right off the bat, but they’re sharp nonetheless and owe a lot of power and stability to the percussion (think a steam-powered approach to Khthoniik Cerviiks’ nuclear tech-nology). Porta Nigra work their magic by holding the attention with pure energy–just check the smoldering fury “Völkerbrand” for a taste of going over the top in a foolhardy charge to no man’s land. Breaknecking, whipping fury to be certain, but Porta Nigra still twist it to the violent, somber narrative with the haunting synths and furious voice of doom on the shelled out breakdown of the bridge. The chorus cries out like a collective prayer and subsequent resurgence of strength and will through the fire. Struck again with another breakdown there’s an “oh fuck why am I crawling so slow and where the fuck are my legs?!” moment, yet the song still ends with that final battle cry as the riff rips back to thrash one last time before swiftly meeting its end.

Even the softer moments hold the attention, with the pacing of the “Bestienschuld” interlude gently plucking at the solemn tension beneath a monologue without falling into the doldrums, reverently carrying the album into the second half…

…wait no, fuck you, mourning is over. It’s back to the conflict on “Die Himmlische Revolution,” the lead guitar diving like artillery shells wailing in the night sky over a heavily palm-muted machine gun guitar/percussion accompaniment. The musicianship is fluid–almost too fluid considering its crude subject matter–finding something human and organic in the mechanized slaughter the band presents.

While the avant-garde tag may be an instant turnoff to those casually perusing for new albums to check out–fear not! Porta Nigra maintain a honed, iron-willed focus on delivering an album that sounds like its challenging them in the riff and songwriting department while delivering an interesting but digestible work. No sign of trench-born art school dysentery here! If anything, I suspect the “avant-garde dark metal” tag comes from being unable easily classify the band between black, death, and thrash with a technical edge. I’ll put it this way: on Weltende, Porta Nigra don’t let their artistic vision get in the way of making a good extreme metal record that smashes the face like a trench shovel. The tech (-nology or -nical musicianship) reflects the crude killing machines of the time–burgeoning  brutal but effective warfare that marked so violently a bookend to an era and the beginning of another. Weltende, indeed…