ALBUM REVIEW: To Be Cruel – Khanate

It’s been a while for fans of KHANATE, with the band being dormant since 2009 and little to suggest they’d be returning. However, they’ve not left one ounce of their old form behind. To Be Cruel is a mammoth undertaking in each track, with the shortest coming in at 21 minutes, this isn’t an album of easily digestible tunes. What it is, however, is an hour’s worth of demonic scene setting and atmospheric un-creation. Its barren, wasted ideology is a testament to all suffering and malcontent. Buckle in, this is going to be an album that changes you irrevocably, for better or worse.

As mentioned, there’s no urgency to any of these 20-minute tracks, and no sentiment at all that KHANATE are in the least bit interested in grabbing your attention. You’re either in or you’re not. Once the first five minutes of Like A Poisoned Dog’s intro starts to shape itself into something conscious, the raspy, chaotic vocals of Alan Dublin are in full force. It’s a horrific endurance test, a real soundtrack to revel in the madness to. The stabs of those high gain guitars are as crunchy and crispy as you can get. The feeling of the whole record has a sense of the analogue about it; it feels like coming across a thing from another dimension. And with that same sentiment, the warping, waiting and screaming of the instruments feels like listening to something old and violent waking up.

KHANATE lean into the avant-garde like never before on this record. The punk sentiment of every element, of being grating and antagonistic, is palpable. For fans of extreme doom in a cinematic vein, this is a test of your enjoyment levels in this septic vein of the genre. In fact, it’s a test to anyone’s endurance of bleak, demented soundscapes. It Wants To Fly is almost more threatening than the first third. It’s more bare bones than its predecessor perhaps, but is all the more menacing for it as you await any eventual break in the slow, meandering darkness.

Likewise, title track and last unholy offering To Be Cruel is a dramatic feast of occasional moaning guitars, deranged screams and laboured barks of snare and hiss of symbols. The dissonance and raw madness on offer is creepy, eerie and leaves you feeling itchy through to your very soul. It’s almost odd when there are nearly five minutes of droning, screeching and screaming in the final moments. While this doesn’t much count as a song, it is the fullest sense of anything on this record without swathes of tormented nothingness for minutes at a time.

This is an album not for the faint of heart, as was KHANATE’s full intention. With so sparse a rule book, To Be Cruel paints a barren wasteland so twisted and hard to swallow, you’ll be hard pressed to manage it all in one sitting. And if you do, then you’ll feel a poorer soul by its end, no question. If that’s your thing though, you’ll absolutely revel in the ugliness of this.

Rating: 6/10

To Be Cruel is set for release on June 30th via Sacred Bones.

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