Long Live Khanate

Março 23rd, 2009 • música
Tags: aliens, doom, dvd, filme, filmes, khanate, metal, s, show, shows, sonic, Time, Video

Khanate Springs Eternal 
In praise of some dearly departed, egocentic, avant-metal assholes 
By Phil Freeman 
Tuesday, March 17th 2009 at 3:16pm 

It’s rare that a band truly leads by example, particularly in metal, where stylistic and genre parameters are strictly patrolled. The New York City avant-doom quartet Khanate, though, followed its own path from 2001 to 2006, combining a crushing musical and spiritual heaviness with a mastery of silence that created and sustained suspense without any of metal’s usual horror-movie theatricality. You can hear the roots of their sound in the slow first half of the title track to Black Sabbath’s namesake 1970 debut, except here, drummer Tim Wyskida’s cymbals play the part of the rain and Stephen O’Malley’s guitar echoes the church bells (and not Tony Iommi’s gloomy riffing). Khanate’s excoriating marathons of pain never permitted the cathartic release inherent in even the heaviest rock. Unfortunately, no group can operate at this level of intensity for long, and after two full-length CDs, several limited-run live CDs and DVDs, and 2006′s Capture & Release EP, they split. Read more »

Khanate

Janeiro 13th, 2009 • música
Tags: amor, doom, funeral doom, khanate, música, review

Khanate foi a última banda a realmente me impressionar. O som que eles fazem supera qualquer som que se chamaria de pesado.

Eles não eram mesmo uma banda para poucos. Eles eram uma banda para eles mesmos. Vai ficar na memória de poucos que tiveram o privilégio de vê-los ao vivo. Quisera eu ser um deles. 

O texto abaixo é a melhor descrição que eu já vi deles. Khanate era isso.

Named for a period of Mongol rule, New York City’s Khanate was not a band for few; they were a band for no one. Guitar snarled, spat, heaved and shrieked; horizon wide riffs revealed their selves only to contort into thorny scrabbles of feedback, broken harmonics, dog whistle whine. Drums stalked and plummeted and perforated; stabbing, clubbing, knocking craters into each song’s structure deep enough to fill with the pain that “vokill” troll Alan Dubin must carry with him. Whispers—words given in confidence; screams—declarations of the state of affairs; converse—talk taken into worm-infested graves and worn as a beard of bees. Bassist James Plotkin was an essential part of the Khanate ritual, turning nothing into something; realizing presence in empty rooms via boiling bass rattles, and laptop mad science. 

“I wear a human shield—shh-shh.” 

Dubin sometimes screamed so shrilly he went black; passing out from the power of his own breath. Plotkin blew four bass heads in one year; O’Malley plumbed the darkest depths of A minor, his strings nearly disconnected from their neck. Whatever heads drummer Tim Wyskida hammered have passed the terror test; that skin company’s practically got a goldmine of an endorsement ad waiting in the wings. Significantly, the gear fails to acquiesce most of the time, beaten into the void as a beachhead by tidal torrent. Read more »