3 out of 5

Label: Sacred Bones

Produced by: Colin Marston, Jaime Gomez Arellano (recorded by)

You can not like it; you can be actively turned off by it; but I’d think it’s hard for a Khanate album to fall flat… and yet, that was my first take on the group’s 10+ years-later return with To Be Cruel. For all surface intents and purposes, the Khanate elements are wholly intact: the sparse, devastating slams of drums; the burble-to-growl guitar tears and electronic manipulations; the 20-minute long runtimes; and, of course, Alan Dubin’s absolutely terrifying (and throat-searing) vocals. But there was enough of something that felt off to merit letting the music sit and stew in my ears for a bit. That’s an approach that has always been true for Khanate, however, for their previous releases, once an initial album tuned me in to their sound, that sitting and stewing was more of an active, “pleasurable” pursuit (only in quotes because one kind of endures music of this type as opposed to rocking out to it); my subsequent spins of Cruel were like clue-hunting missions – when did I check out on the songs? What was making me lose the thread?

Going back and refreshing my memory of those other releases gave following up with this 2023 release a much more positive framing: it’s funny to requalify those albums as relatively “direct,” but that was an immediate difference, and one we can attribute to age and ‘maturity,’ perhaps – the first two songs on Cruel duck out on big moments where we might predict them; the shattering of speakers occurs and then the next strum / drum hit is subtle. On ‘It Wants To Fly,’ as soon as the narrative seems like it should pick up, it slows, and the song stops and starts; stops and starts. I actually think this is the weakest song of the set as a result, but it gave me the steps I needed towards adjusting my ears to this refreshed Khanate.

The next realization: Dubin’s lyrics have become pretty straightforward. This is put to devastating effect on opener Like A Poisoned Dog, which flips back and forth between depressive ode and a visceral, violent blame game, but much has been made of the serial killer narrative of ‘Fly’ – describing skinning / dissecting someone, making them watch – but it’s pretty limited, and once Dubin starts spiraling this into getting to his victim’s soul, which is a few lines in, the story’s over. It continues in the title track concluder interestingly (recounting other victims – and yeah, I’m over simplifying the concept in order to provide the gist), but, man, then it gets super cringey towards the end, trying to add to the imagery and give it a bit too direct of poignancy. Khanate has certainly always played with dark themes, but I guess I preferred the obliqueness of before, when I could apply my own meaning.

Both of these elements kind of inform the last note, where habit has the group carrying every song on a bit too long, or swerving things into a section that undermines the impact. Poisoned Dog is nearly perfect for its whole run, slowly building and building until an indirect release of feedback and squiggly drums / guitar, but there’s a drawn out bridge that veers from the lyrical and musical focus, made even more questionable when we return to the original lines without anything really added. There was a punishing, perfect conclusion several minutes before. ‘Fly,’ as mentioned, stops and starts and also doesn’t add much to its effect by doing so; musically, To Be Cruel is perfect, but there’s the way the words – rather clearly enunciated on this outing – become pretty eye-rolly. So at each step, I’m somewhat taken out of the album, and there’s part of me that wonders if the recording style – not handled by Plotkin for, I think, the first time, and also in separate sessions for guitar and drums / bass and vocals – had any impact on that.

That said, there’s still… nothing exactly like this. With time, I’ll learn to tune out or subsume the elements that don’t work, and absolutely sink into the ones that do. The plus side of these 20+ minute long songs is that there’s plenty of time to do that with each track, and each listen does give me more and more of a hold on this particular outing. You can hear how time has passed for the group, and while that may have resulted in softening of some elements I preferred, I also would rather that than they try to repeat exactly the formula from previous albums.