Music I Like From Portland

When I was younger I thought Seattle was the center of the musical world. But I can’t help noticing that most of the bands I saw at concerts in the years leading up to the pandemic were up from Portland. And as I’m putting together these Music I Like posts, which are based mostly on digital discovery and therefore shouldn’t be geographically centered, it still seems like most of the bands are from Portland. So here’s a post all about the music I like from Portland.

Nightfell

Think diner chili, not kale salad. Hipsters be damned, Nightfell is serving up some greasy death metal on A Sanity Deranged. I didn’t even know they were from Portland the first time I heard this album. I just saw 20 Buck Spin was their label and hit play. Glad I did.

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Portlandia isn’t best known for black metal, but only because black metal is underground – which is very Portland. Let us not forget that Portland was home to the sacred Agalloch.

Mizmor

My husband sent me an email with a link to Mizmor‘s Yodh and the subject line “This sounds like your jam” and I thought, “Oh yeah, Mizmor, I do like that.” But then I couldn’t find any reference to the project on the blog, so I have no idea where I heard them before. Anyway, this one-man black metal project from Portland has newer music out. Check out Dialetheia which I maybe like even better.

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Falls of Rauros

Hahaha, Falls of Rauros are actually from Portland, Maine. But I’m shoehorning them in because I keep running into them everywhere, and every time, I forget what I’m doing to listen. I almost put them into an upcoming post on “the death metal mold” because they are all about the archetypes. From the Tolkien referencing band name, to the album title Patterns in Mythology, and song titles like “Detournement” referencing the nihilistic French artists that so enamored Greil Marcus these guys are all about form and epic gestures. But they don’t sound archetypal at all, with a healthy blend of black, post- and doom and prog in their music, they just sound like themselves.

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Coffin Rot

Okay, we’re back to the real Portland with Coffin Rot. Their album Monument to the Dead is seriously OSDM with a dash of thrash and I love it.

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Drown

Drown is the funeral doom project of Portlander Markov Soroka. Subaqueous is a concept album of a sort. While I don’t know what the story is, there is a suffocating quality to the album that is (I can say with confidence as someone who once nearly drowned) something like drowning, but infinitely more enjoyable.

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Mark Orton

I discovered Portland-based composer Mark Orton (also of Tin Hat) thanks to a typo when I was searching for the solo album by Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton. Orton’s music for the radio show “This American Life” is a far cry from what I was looking for, but it was just what I needed to hear. I wish more of his stuff was available on Bandcamp.

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From the Petrified Forest

The petrified forest is in Arizona, but the one-man From the Petrified Forest project is from Portland. I’ve written before about Marzipan doesn’t have any vocals. But the songwriting is as interesting and varied as the themes of its three tracks (whales, flowers, and ants).

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