Khanate - To Be Cruel - White - VINYL LP

The highly influential avant-garde supergroup Khanate return with their first new album in 14 years, taking their signature improvisational doom to new levels of sadistic extreme. Khanate are Stephen O'Malley (Sunn O))), Burning Witch and Thorr's Hammer), James Plotkin and Alan Dubin (OLD) and Tim Wyskida (Blind Idiot God, Manbyrd). Album Tracks 1. Like a Poisoned Dog 2. It Wants to Fly 3. To Be Cruel

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). Album Tracks 1. Pieces of Quiet 2. Skin Coat 3. Torching Koroviev 4. Under Rotting Sky 5. No Joy

Sensing that defenses to their contagion were down, Things Viral (2003) withdrew from any familiar or friendly shapes. On their second offering, the band decelerated to it's own tempo, freezing the decay of the debut in a shocking and powerful stasis. Pitchfork lauds, InchKhanate have that skill for unfolding an action in such excruciating detail that you're slowly edged off your seat... Things Viral is extreme enough to appeal to people who don't have any interest in met- al; the members cross metal pedigrees with noise-drone-art-damage bands- from Burning Witch and Old, to Sunn 0))), to Blind Idiot God's Tim Wyskida on drums. It's committed but not overbearing, too resolute and unyielding to resist; it'll grab your skull and hold you achingly still as it thrashes through the depths, then totally, quietly wears itself out.Inch Album Tracks 1. Commuted 2. Fields 3. Dead 4. Too Close Enough to Touch