Review: Portraits of Past - 01010101
Took me quite a while to write this, but not because it was long, but because during the process I pretty much scrapped three longer drafts about my writing towards this album since I wasn't able to write cohesively. It was frustrating of course, and to make matters worse I'm not sure what it is to blame here. After constant revaluations whether I should continue, I decided it's worth investing more of my time to do so because it feels kinda wrong not telling the place what I feel towards this album as a whole even though I didn't put a catchy title for more clicks but whatever.
Screamo (or skramz, whichever you prefer to
call it but I dislike the latter term) is something I'm not quite well-versed
to, but after I encountered Portraits of Past my interest towards the genre
grows exponentially. But let me just get straight to the point, currently I'm
listening to this album a lot and being gaga over it, and I'm slowly beginning
to think this is probably one of the greatest things I've listened to, that or
because it's one of the few things I'm being able to relate to completely for
quite some time.
The emotion being displayed in 01010101 was
quite clear: it was extremely grim for the lack of a better word, but it was
also immensely gorgeous. Namely, Portraits of Past had their songwriting on
target, it barely had any flaws that detract the quality of the album to the
point all of the songs here were able to bring a great deal of astonishment,
which is generally and obviously a hard thing to accomplish. To say that
Portraits of Past isn't grim enough is kinda wrong, because songs like the
completely bleak sounding Bang Yer Head or its follow-up The Control Freak is a
testament that the band adhered the rule of thumb on putting emotion as the
first thing on the pedestal, like their lives depends on it. Sure, plastering
words like 'emotional' on a genre like screamo isn't saying much, but at times
it can be indeed genuine, and this one isn't an exception.
Interestingly, the thing about Portraits of
Past being wholly emotional was not because of their vocals themselves: that honour
goes to the instrumentational work. This isn't to say the howled vocals were
bad, but instrumentally speaking this album was able to scream a plethora of
moods ranging from melancholia to fits of rage more so than the actual vocals.
It's dynamically powerful; alternating by building and releasing tension
effortlessly from the guitars by playing soft, intricate playing to being loud
and harsh, in the end making the album not entirely dull throughout. It's
exciting, because everytime the guitars go blaring it was like a ton of bricks
came down and crashing onto you while the softer parts are a total bliss to
listen to, and it's safe to assume Portraits of Past knew what they were doing
at this point since it was executed brilliantly.
Furthermore, the flow of the album was quite perfect. From point A to point Z the listening experience wasn't even a drag at all, in fact everytime I listened to it doesn't even feel like 30 minutes passed by. If anything it felt blazed through instead like it was nothing, and I can only imagine Portraits went all out in the songwriting department by writing and recording extensively just to get things right. It's very cohesive, and to think that Portraits were one of the earliest groups to play under the screamo banner (long before the term exists, I believe), and not to mention, their music was able to stood out amongst their contemporaries including their modern-day brethren are most impressive.
"Something Less Than Intended" acted as the final closure for the album. Like most bands would do, ending an album with a bang is needed, and Portraits does indeed end their album with a bang. The energy they accumulated throughout were now being focused solely on the song, filling it with dissonant and crescendo-esque riffing. The idea of listening to your favourite band loud is always a cliché one, but Portraits of Past deserved to be played loud, and in my experience when this song popped up through my stereo with unnecessary high volume for the first time it amped up my emotional intake of this album to the max, resulting me to play the album entirely for like four times in a row once without taking any fucking breaks whatsoever.
Funny, because back then when I first
started out listening to screamo I always thought this album isn't that
impressive. Although binging hard to an another different band pretty much
clouded my mind during that time, but now I firmly believe Portraits of Past
are possibly one of the greatest bands screamo has to offer, though the
tremendous amount of misunderstanding towards the term that made people to
think that screamo is mainly associated with scene bands nowadays pretty much
diminished any chance of Portraits (or any proper screamo for that matter)
getting further recognition today, which I found depressing.
If you're reading this far it's obvious I'm
going to say 1010101 is an amazing album, but now that I think about it, the
word 'amazing' is kinda an understatement for a near-masterpiece such as this.
Portraits of Past definitely had that x-factor where everything is musically
possible for them, but their unfortunate disbandment hindered their possibility
of showing any great potential in the future (though, they released an EP like
in 2009, but aside from that there’s no news about them). Fans of Funeral Diner
or any screamo that's in the vein of being post-rockish will definitely like
this album, and I'm saying this because one of the members of Portraits drummed
with the aforementioned band right after the breakup, plus their similarity is
quite close but still unique on their own right as well.
This is the soundtrack to be cynical with yourself or just facing illogical anxiety, or both, and in this case it's good because this album is cathartic, but not entirely suffocating.
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