Icelandic trio The Vintage Caravan have always loved hard hitting, riff fueled music. “No gimmick or catch, just pure love for the music,” they once said. While classic hard rock from the sixties and seventies has always shaped their sound, the band has said that they never set out to be a band that sounded like it was frozen in 1971 and then put in the microwave all these years later. Their 2021 album Monuments made that clear, stretching in new directions. The trio, singer guitarist Óskar Logi Ágústsson, bassist Alexander Örn Númason, and drummer Stefán Ari Stefánsson, now return with their sixth album, Portals. If Monuments showed them stretching, Portals finds them evolving into something greater.
Recorded in Porto, Portugal, the album’s seventeen tracks, including five interludes titled Portal I through V, run just over an hour. Númason described the goal of the album as doing what they had never been able to do before, capture the live essence of the band on record. To reach that, they filled the recording room with sound. Unafraid to let let things bleed together, cranked up amps stood near the drum kit letting air and vibration blend until, as he put it, “you hear everything in everything.” That natural spill of tone and rhythm defines Portals. It is about three players responding in real time, turning the room itself into part of the performance, and more than on past albums, resisting the urge to complicate ideas that simply work, trusting when a song has said enough.
Between the songs, the five Portals act as bridges. Númason spent months cutting ten second loops from about fifty found cassettes, old worship music, a Russian folk tape, whatever turned up in second hand shops. He then stretched and layered them with synth textures and field recordings from the streets of Porto. The fragments became miniature worlds, handmade transitions carrying voices, birds, and room noise from one piece to the next. Óskar calls them “the proggiest choice we have made,” a move that lends conceptual flow while keeping the music balanced between intricacy and catchiness.
I didn't think the band could top Monuments, yet here they are. Building a world from physical sound, live energy, and handmade transitions, Portals is an album of monumental proportions that plays like a single performance stretched into seventeen movements. It reminds me why I have always loved the album format when everything flows together, because musical odysseys thrill when done well. And Portals is done masterfully.
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