Album Review: Khanate – Capture & Release / Clean Hands Go Foul

Album Review: Khanate – Capture & Release / Clean Hands Go Foul [REISSUES]
Reviewed by Dan Barnes

If reports from the Sunn O))) Hordes Worldwide Facebook group are to be believed – and it usually is a trusted source on such matters – then Khanate’s appearance at the Roadburn Festival this year was little short of astounding. Hardly surprising really when you consider the four member’s individual feats in bands like OLD, Gnaw and Blind Idiot God, as well as the obvious Sunn O))) themselves.

This coming together saw the swift releases of the self-titled debut in 2001 and its follow-up, Things Viral a couple of years later. Both albums found a home on Southern Lord Records and combined thick drones with a raw and suffocating sludge sound.

With both albums clocking in at around an hour, the two tracks of Capture & Release meant that, despite its forty-three-minute duration, this 2005 record was considered an EP. Inspired by a road journey through a Scandinavian forest and a chat about serial killers, produced by bassist James Plotkin, it was the band’s first release on Hydra Head Records.

Capture is the shortest of the two, clocking in at just eighteen minutes, and establishes an unsettling atmosphere in the first three and a half minutes. Whispering vocals and cutting guitars sit alongside a time-dilating rhythm section, though whether Plotkin and drummer, Tim Wyskida, ever create a conventional rhythm is up for debate.

Alan Durbin’s vocal switch between demonic whispers and howling, pained shrieks. So, if the nature of this album is from the psyche of a serial killer, one could only surmise we’re listening to the dialogues of a broken mind.

Musically raw and uncompromising, Stephen O’Malley’s guitar parts are sparingly used, but violent when they are. The string-drag adding even more to the fleshed-out drones and glacial pacing. Morbid and doom-laden, Capture as stark as the environment inspiring it.

Its companion, the twenty-five-minute, Release, offers no respite and, instead, spends its opening three and a half minutes conjuring the kind of creature you might expect to be emerging from a sewer. Tortured vocals and otherworldly screams abound here, complimenting the ground-level bass and some of the filthiest sludge you’re likely to hear.

For its first half, Release is like a demonic manifesto and, just when you think it will break and resolve itself, it goes even more slow and measured. For the next seven minutes you’ll find yourself on the edge of your seat, waiting for the Sabbathian riff to reconcile itself in a huge crash. That resolution does not arrive, even though the weight of expectation is almost mania inducing.

When the storm does come, it’s not the maelstrom you’re expecting and the whole edifice seems to collapse in on itself, brought down by its own overbearing mass. There are no increased tempos, no shredding guitars and no resolution to either Release or the album as a whole. There is only a feeling of emptiness and despair; and the power of music to rend your soul apart.

Following the issuing of this record, Khanate would part ways in September 2006. Festival offers would see them reunited and issuing a fourth album in 2009, one that more closely resembled the structure of the first two.

Album Review: Khanate – Capture & Release / Clean Hands Go Foul [REISSUES]

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Clean Hands Go Foul was released in May 2009, again on Aaron Turner’s Hydra Head Records, and again be produced by James Plotkin. The producer even stated that Clean Hands… is demonstrative of the band’s excentric approach to composition, whereby they would wholly embrace a complete change in direction, purely for the sake of experimentation.

To show this, the entire album is built up of unedited first takes of the tracks. Beginning with Wings from Spine, which is Khanate’s second shortest song, and opening with the sound of howling winds and screaming cacodemons. To some extent it feels like an offcut from the Black One session, until Stephen’s guitar starts to chime with clean notes. Alan’s vocals are as demented as ever, and the drums seem to have a path of their own to follow.

Across the first three songs of Clean Hands… there is the sound of a jam session, with Plotkin’s bass being the stabilising factor. In that Corner finds the vocals lying low in the mix and great periods of quiet add an oppressive sense of dread. The occasional guitar flourish lifts the tone of this ten-minute tune which is both resolutely bleak and stubbornly hopeful. Clean my Heart treads a similar path but underscores it with a sustained chord and something of an industrial aesthetic. From the incoming storm of the opening to the supplemented drone of the conclusion, this feels like one of Khanate’s more unsettling tracks.

All previous three are paving the way for Clean Hands Go Foul’s colossal, epic finale, the thirty-three-minute conclusion, Every God Damn Thing. For the first thirty-minutes it is an exercise in restraint, as guitars noodle and infrequent bass notes rise and fall. The climax, therefore, comes across as shockingly violent and I would recommend a darkened room and the best set of headphones you can lay you hands on to experience this one to the full.

Following Clean Hands Go Foul, Khanate would again go their separate ways, surprisingly reconvening many years later for 2023’s To Be Cruel album.

A cursory look at the personnel involved and the output of their day jobs should tell you all you need to know as to what Khanate are all about. Both Capture & Release and Clean Hands Go Foul are dense and uncompromising slabs of heavy sounds. Bleak and nihilistic, they are an expression of the edges of music, pushed to their extremes. Approach with caution; but do certainly approach.