Aural Aggravation

Sacred Bones – 1st December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The unexpected and unannounced arrival of Khanate’s fifth album, some seventeen years after they declared that they were calling it a day, and fourteen years after the release of the posthumous Clean Hands Go Foul caused quite a stir in certain circles – predominantly those occupied by black-clad beard-strokers. Although this is very much a stereotype, I’m reminded of the time I went to see Sunn O))) at The Sage in Gateshead on the same night one of Cheryl Cole’s X-Factor protégé’s was performing in the foyer of the three-stage venue. Incongruous doesn’t come close, and suffice it to say, I wasn’t hard to tell who was there for the ultimate lords of drone-doom and who was there for the cheesy mass-market commercial cash-in shit. There were a lot of beards and leather coats.

The reason Khanate are such big news on the underground is that the band is comprised of James Plotkin, Stephen O’Malley, Alan Dubin and Tim Wyskida, and according to their bio, ‘Together, they make terrifying music.’ Between their formation in 2001 and separation in 2006, they managed to find time out from their main projects to record four monumental albums, and the release of To Be Cruel earlier this year came with the announcement of the reissue of all four, both digitally and physically. And so this brings us to the first of these, their eponymous debut.

The press release sets the expectation, for those unacquainted or unfamiliar, telling of how ‘The cramped corner of hell that Khanate takes the listener to, sonically and psychologically, has almost nothing in common with the doom bands that populate stoner-oriented music festivals across the globe. Khanate is doom as a foregone conclusion, as merciless atmospheric pressure, as a blunt object to crack you over the skull with, slowly, repeatedly, and forever.’

Having only released some demos and their debut ØØ Void, Sunn O))) had yet to really break by the time Khanate came out, and in some ways, they beat Sunn O))) to the mark on launching blasting longform drone to the masses, with an album that featured just five tracks spanning a fill hour. And their colossally expansive duration is matched every inch of the way by the sonic brutality.

The album arrives in a squall of feedback before intestine-crushing low-end chords crash in and grind hard, immediately unsettling the lower colon. Thew gnarliest, most demonic vocals shriek amidst the raging infernal wall of noise, dredged from the molten mantel of deep down below. ‘Pieces of Quiet’ is punishing in every way, but not least in that while its devastating, annihilative work is done after about five minutes, it pounds and grinds on well past the thirteen-minute mark.

In context, doom and drone had both crawled out of the depths a good few years before, and with Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version in 1993, Earth had defined a new form of metal with what will likely stand for all eternity as the ultimate heavy drone work. And yet, these guys believed they could add something further to this – and they were right. Drums, for a start. And vocals.

‘Skin Coat’ is every bit as nasty as the serial killer enthusiast title implies, the guitars mangled to fuck, combining to optimal effect the snarling nastiness of the most blackened of black metal and the sludgiest, most gut-churning doom, with 23bpm drum crashes at the crawling pace of Cop-era Swans. It’s dark and its overtly unpleasant, snarling subterranean oozing tar-thick blackness which crawls like larva and destroys everything in its wake.

‘Torching Koroviev’ is simply a brief interlude which fleetingly opens a portal into hell, before the eighteen-minute ‘Under Rotting Sky’ brings what is arguably the definitive representation of Khanate, again, a squall of feedback prefacing a shredding wall of downtuned and overdriven guitar, billowing and thick with a sludge-like density. It is, of course, an absolute copy of the Sunn O))) model, but with demonic vocals echoing, anguished and wracked with eternal pain through the crushing mesh of noise. It’s fearsome, deranged, the crazed vocal screaming into the abyss. There is no rational or clear way of exploring this: it’s scary, and there is no other way to look. This is the final pulverisation, pacing the way for the album’s brutally dark last track. ‘No Joy’ is appropriately titled, and as heavy as it gets. I crawl, cracked, from the crushing drone experience and as long an hour as nature evaporates from my weary body Slowly the lack-hole darkness takes its grip and begins to crush the very life from my limbs.

This album is twenty-two years old. Yes: twenty-two years. And yet it hasn’t aged a day or even a second. While so much music – particularly rock and metal – has aged and sounds of its time, Khanate froze time when they came together, and the result was like nothing else – and still stands to this day.

AA