Album Review: Khanate - To Be Cruel
Reviewed by Patrick O'Reilly
Khanate abandoned us in 2009 with the devastating 'Clean Hands Go Foul' album, leaving us like newborns free from protection and desperate for the nurturing drones, feedback and volume of our mothers. Now they return with new album 'To Be Cruel', have they mellowed? Have they returned with open arms ready to embrace us in the warm grip of their tube amps glow?
The answer is a resounding NO! if anything they are harsher on this recording, darker and seething ready to commit acts of violence upon us and put into effect a cycle of abuse.
Opening track ‘Like A Poisoned Dog’ flits with psychotic malevolence, never quite settling into a proper rhythm or song structure, instead building up layers of heavy notes and feedback until those vocals come in… OH THOSE VOCALS!! Alan Dubin shrieks and screams like he is coming to the end of a particularly long and ineffectual exorcism, tormenting the listener with his pain and suffering laid bare. The track lumbers along for 19.20 before finally ending in crescendo of bright guitar notes and gong hits.
Second track ‘It Wants To Fly’ is a more brooding, droning number, it still retains the darkness but has lulls and troughs of calm and quiet before another huge riff appears and drags you back into the chasm.
Final track ‘To Be Cruel’ opens in much the same way, quieter but with a sense of malice, Dubin’s vocals calling to mind Attila Csihar before they peak with ferocity and wild-eyed mania and the guitars and drums really kick in to match. This dynamic is repeated over a torturous 20 minutes before the album ends and the healing and regeneration can begin.
Khanate have returned and are ready to blow your mind again, in a bad way, like childhood trauma or a descent into manic depression. In capturing this feeling, they present the listener with a great catharsis and a way to make some sort of sense of the world and the madness within.
