Khanate – To Be Cruel

Sacred Bones

Imagine something really loud. Something really heavy. Something really dark. And it’s coming to get you.

Slowly, very slowly, it’s coming to get you.

So slowly in fact that it takes fourteen years to arrive. Well that, in a nutshell, is the new Khanate album, as the doom metal supergroup return after a hiatus almost as long as the gap between two beats of one of Tim Wyskida‘s mighty drums.

And they haven’t really cheered up much, you’ll be pleased to know. Hardly surprising given the state of the world today, but as you’d expect, their return to the low frequencies with the hilariously Swans-baiting title of To Be Cruel gives us a much more internal kind of anger and catharsis. Alan Dubin‘s vocals still drip with venom, and spite erupts from every piece of guitar and bass torture by Stephen O’Malley and James Plotkin.

I have to admit, it may not be fourteen years since I last listened to them, but it’s been a while, and within seconds of opener “Like A Poisoned Dog” I was like “yeah, THIS is what it’s all about”. It felt like they’d never stopped, and I was just tuning back into a radio station (like we used to have back in ye olden days) that was all Khanate all the time.

Khanate push the doom template so far that the vibe is almost closer to power electronics, but with more power and fewer electronics — bleak, skull-splittingly loud drones barely anchored to the Earth by the vocals and drums. Take those out and slow everything down even further, and you have molecules in stasis at absolute zero — or, in other words, something approaching O’Malley’s work with SunnO))). It’s simultaneously minimalist and all-encompassing, a Wall Of Sound built from four very sturdy bricks.

But the sheer crushing slowness of it all allows for some truly epic dynamics as each track lurches from crescendo to crescendo, the passages between shivering in terror at what is inevitably to come. “It Wants To Fly” continues the mayhem, even getting relatively quiet at points, but it’s a quiet filled with threat and menace, the sound of hiding in a cupboard, knowing that the men with guitars and drums are coming back any time now to continue your torment.

Arguably the best track, though the album’s best listened to as one hour-long piece in three movements, “To Be Cruel” is a meditation on (what the fuck else?) cruelty, Dubin howling in what sounds like genuine anguish as the lads throb and clang away, pushing the maximum amount of hatred from the most minimal arrangement.

If Electric Wizard are an exploitation pic, drenched in sex and psychedelia, Khanate are Salo or Srpski Film, or the early work of Jim Van Bebber. There’s nothing nice or fun here, but the sheer apocalyptic rage is exhilarating. Remember how dirty Whitehouse felt the first time you heard them and didn’t realise how much fun they were having? The sense that you shouldn’t be listening to something this dark, like you’d stumbled on something forbidden — and forbidden for a very good reason.

Would I recommend it? Fuck yes. Wholeheartedly. But you should probably know what you’re getting into — and that’s some VERY dark places. If Dennis Nilsen wasn’t such a big fan of Rick Wakeman you could imagine this being what it sounded like inside his head. It’s music for creating and disposing of corpses. It’s music for dingy basements and dusty attics where terrible things occur. It’s the sound of trauma. It’s drone doom in the most literal sense. And it’s no fun at all. In fact, it’s the most genuinely frightening album I’ve heard in a long time. But it IS amazing.

“CRY WITH ME”, Dubin shrieks on the title track.

Why yes, Alan. Why, yes, I think I will.

-Justin Farrington-