Khanate - Clean Hands Go Foul - VINYL LP

Clean Hands Go Foul (2009) generously offers more of everything voluminousdrones, clashing dissonance, mysterious subharmonic swells, escalating terror,and environments drenched in heavy anticipatory dread.The final hour of the band's first decade sees Khanate, as always, making Inchmusicthat, even in the realm of extreme music, is dark and distortedInch (Pitchfork).Clean Hands Go Foul would be followed by the ultimate minimalism, as theKhanate entity sat shrouded in silence until the of 2023's To Be Cruel.

Largely recognized as their breakthrough album, Khanate was confidentenough by the two-song, forty-minute Capture & (2005) to peel back it'slayers of thick mossy droneand reveal the minimalist underpinnings, a changeeither interpreted as maturity or an implied threat. InchIt's a grim, avant-gardeexercise in tension and paranoia. Dense, leaden drones fill up the spaces betweenO'Malley's sparse, deeply sustained guitar chords.Vocalist Alan Dubin's anguished vocals seem to convey the tortures of thedamned as if there were not a shred of hope left for existence in this world.Capture & is not dissimilar to black metal in how it so violently conveyssuch a bleak and ultra-nihilistic world outlook. But while the standard tempoon a black metal album typically strays into the triple digits in terms of beats perminute, Khanate's plodding pace keeps the BPM soundly within the singledigit range.Inch (Tiny Mix Tapes).

Khanate's self titled debut (2001) has all the pleasant ambiance of a plane crash site, a bleak urban waste of mangled and torn metal beams and hissed alarms. When Khanate first issued instructions to the void in 2001, the band was embraced as the next iteration of guitarist Stephen O'Malley's tube-cracking forays into amplifier variance; a fascinating further step of vocalist Alan Dubin and low-frequency shifter James Plotkin's space charts; and a warning forthe crawling-pace hammers of Tim Wyskida's drums. But Khanate was not preaching of coming doom or offering emotional catharsis. The band was totally post-dread. The worst had already happened, and would continue to happen, over and over. The 5 songs on Khanate sound like an Inchorchestrated root canalInch (Julian Cope).