When this dropped…or more accurately seeped through the bricks like mould… I felt like the Paul Spericki character in Grosse Point Blank, slamming the steering wheel in his car and exclaiming to Martin Blank “Fourteen years man! Fourteen Years!!!!”
So now anyone in their early twenties is looking at me like I’m insane. How to explain Khanate and what they did to the musical landscape? James Plotkin and Stephen O’Malley meet at an Isis gig so legend says. Alan Dubin had played with Plotkin. Tim Wyskida appeared. And together they decided to see how much pain and utter insanity they could commit to tape. Three full length albums: Khanate, Things Viral and Clean Hands Go Foul, with the equally insidious ‘Capture And Release’ EP left behind like urban legends of indescribable crimes in the derelict tenements…
They are hard work. So slow that you’ve forgotten the previous chord when the next comes along. A tone that sounds like blood and semen soaked blankets dragged through a sewer. And those vocals. They are the sound of the terrible and utterly unhinged thoughts within a collapsing human screaming and clawing their way out. Think Burning Witch with less speed, less framework, and more of everything wrong and virus riddled.
Yeah, Khanate are diseased.
What is left of them after fourteen years? Well here are three pieces all about twenty minutes long give or take. Just over an hour of this. ‘Like A poisoned Dog’, ‘It Wants To Fly’ and ‘To Be Cruel’.
The first sound sets the tone, a chord, or half of one, a drawn out drone. A second lower reverberating like a sewer pipe vibrating. About three chords in a minute. Something that might be feedback or electronics or just the hissing voices in my head, I don’t know. Drums come in hammer blows, slow and monumental, occasionally halting everything. The guitar moans and creaks like rusted girders before the inevitable collapse. And at the five minute mark the vocals begin to scream…’I feel dead, take a swim in gasoline, throw a match, might as well…..you’re the reason I fell dead…” The torture crawls on, and on and you sit waiting for the match to fall. It’s horrible. And it is utterly the Khanate from fourteen years ago, just festering waiting for the pipe to crack and leak out…
“I’m going to take you apart…” Dubin’s voice tears the words from his throat a minute into ‘It Wants To Fly’. It just descends from there, “It’s alright, you can look away. Your body is alive…I can see the skin crawl. Look if you want to, you can look if you want. I’m going to rip…” It’s like falling from then on. Slowly sinking through something not right as body and soul are torn slowly from one another. The music is perfect; bitter, dark, slow and horrible. Like watching the end of Martyrs. “Your soul is here but cannot fly. We’re too far down. There’s nothing here.”
‘To Be Cruel’ is all questions. Questions daring them to do the unthinkable. To be cruel, to “deface a face”. There are no answers of course, merely something finding itself at the bottom of a pit, nowhere left to go, nothing else to feel and pondering if that last stain, the black filth of hate is the one that can make them feel something once more.
Khanate, for whatever reason, had to get this out. It is slow, it is beyond ponderous, it is difficult and if you were a fan fourteen years ago you NEED this. If you were shitting in nappies or having an idyllic childhood; this is what your parents sheltered you from.
This is not for everyone, and most will be glad of that, or sneer to hide their worry.
Khanate is not what’s outside, but what is inside squirming and screaming and tearing to get out. And it is not right.
But it is terrifying genius.
(9.5/10 Gizmo)
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