Album Review : Khanate - To Be Cruel (2023)
Never in a million years would have I thought Khanate was ever going to release another record. The band entered an indefinite hiatus after the experimental and monolithic Clean Hands Go Foul in 2009 and there was no reason to believe the members would ever make new music. Alan Dubin formed GNAW, Stephen O’Malley is involved in a million things and it generally seemed like something that burned too bright to last. But I was wrong. The most extreme act in doom metal dropped a surprise record this month.
It's called To Be Cruel and it's as vile, dislocated and fucking awesome as anything they’ve ever done. Perhaps even more.
To Be Cruel features three songs of roughly equal length and one hour of doom metal so extreme, it barely qualifies as music. The opener Like A Poisoned Dog (what a fucked up song title) starts with four minutes and a half of slow, discordant riffs and Alan Dubin breathing into his microphone, occasionally being disrupted by shambolic, obsessive percussion that break the song down. It starts taking a more conventional structure around the five minutes mark, but it’s not getting any pretty.
Alan Dubin's is pleading for mercy with his primitive visions and apocalyptic rasp. Feedback is slashing through your ears. Like A Poisoned Dog is a physically hostile experience. That's the thing making Khanate such an intense experience. The members are four music intellectuals self-consciously trying to push the boundaries of pain and ugliness in their craft and wildly making the most of it. It's premeditated, like a kidnapping of your soul.
The following song It Wants to Fly may or may not be my favourite thing Khanate has ever recorded yet. I haven't made up my mind, but it's up there with No Joy, Dead and Every God Damn Thing. Narrating an open invitation to watch something ungodly, it is really carried by the manic incantations of Alan Dubin who embodies the voice of evil himself guiding the listener into his own private hell. Tim Wyskida's pounding, distruptive drum and Stephen O'Malley fuzzy, rich riffs create an unpredictable atmosphere.
I love how the song breaks down into a spoken word monologue about five minutes in. The grain of Alan Dubin voice can be heard in all its fucked up glory like never before on a Khanate record. Seriously, there’s barely even sound at some point. He's so calm on this song too, like narrating these horrors and inviting the listener to look at its demise. I've read and heard a thousand of shitty serial killer narration in my life, but it isn't one of them. It Wants to Fly feels dangerous and out of control in the best possible way.
To Be Cruel concludes with the title song, which is arguably the most subdued piece on the record. For as subdued as Khanate can get. It’s also the most thoroughly and conventionally written. It almost sounds like other doom metal, but not quite. It’s very much an odyssey. A downward spiral into audio hell that has memorable moments along the way, but not real spine. I loved the tidal wave of feedback around the seven minutes mark followed by an almost silence. A complete shift from what came before.
It really starts getting fucked up at the nine minutes mark, though when Alan Dubin shrieks: "I'm an at all-time low" and once again the song breaks downs into a bare construction of reverberating sounds and Dubin starts going off about a spider being us. Khanate has always explored the idea of time in songs and how it affects our perception and emotions and the title song of To Be Cruel is a great example of what the band seeks to achieve when they're together.
They blend silence with riffs and chord and sometimes just noise. Quiet and loud. All of this in an unpredictable structure that wobbles like a desperate drunk looking for a place to crawl and die in. Extreme music is often furious and over-the-top, but Khanate is a different sort of extreme. It has a diabolical sincerity and abandon. That’s what makes them so fun and liberating to listen to I think. It’s music you can be a fucking wreck of a human being to. Something nasty bleeds out of you every time you press PLAY.
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What to think of this Khanate revival? I fucking love it. My overall surprise and happiness to have new material after a fourteen years layoff might dull my critical sense a little bit, but it doesn't feel like these guys lost it at all. It's up to par with the old stuff and it has this inquisitive weirdness that keeps adding layers of that toxic self-consciousness we all love about their work. It's as compromising as it is experimental and broken. There's everything that you love about the band on To Be Cruel and little fucked up extras.
