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Khanate - Clean Hands Go Foul

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 February 18 2009 at 04:07:44 PM



Spectacular failure particularly fits. Khanate’s posthumous recording Clean Hands Go Foul certainly wants to wear miserable failure as its credo, but too many will laud its non-existent “drone” or “rockingness” or “melody” to render these thin improvisational studio-enhanced experiments as anything remotely worthy of pity. You’ve got to consider the raw material, of course, and apologists will hoe this row to no end. Perhaps the raw material explains the just-lie-there coital approach to “jamming” taken? Perhaps the raw material explains why CHGF is now only consumer ready? Perhaps the raw material explains Khlyst, and KTL, and vokill troll Alan Dubin’s formation of the aptly titled, Gnaw? Perhaps. I’m not one compelled to paw tea leaves.

Yet there’s cause for praise. How often does a band completely abandon its sonic aesthetics and strive for something not only partaking of a modicum of “uniqueness,” but also that which is completely antithetical to its fundamental and defining character? Not often. Rather than lapse into some sort of sweet tea fueled, “Let Us Now Praise Death Dwarves, or How I Slugged It Out with Al, Steve, Tim, and Jim,” I’ll just say Khanate’s aforementioned fundamental and defining character, i.e. the fetishization of silence and punctuation of performative lyrics with a mastodonic tripartite combination of guitar/bass/drums is what-it-is-to-be Khanate. Shirking fundamentals usually draws the high-brow laud for bona fides experiment. All it’s going to garner from me is a charge of indifference, ennui, self-hatred. Not-so-well-documented is the friction, the frustration between the four, and yet it’s difficult to imagine four men chomping at the bit to document music of this sort. Guess why Tim pitter-patters instead of pounds and pummels? Guess why Steve swaps ear-splitting bedlam for elegiac locus solus? Guess why Jim either retraces Steve’s steps or gives airborne C-130 hum? Guess why Alan shrieks and screams as strongly as ever before, providing confessional words that doubly disturb and delight? Does it matter?

No. These may be the four that comprised what-it-was-to-be Khanate from the self-titled to Capture & Release, but farting around playing Stefan Jaworzyn’s Ascension, or Fushitsusha simulacra is best kept in the can. The new approach ably works at working, especially via “In That Corner,” even when the amorphousness of it all sounds like the mess it truly is. Unbridled success is limited to “Every God Damn Thing,” which would have benefited from a massive cut of the front three-quarters which features “European flavored” improvisational miniaturism usually hewed from the hands of somber, severely coiffed gents who favor rustles and rumbles to African-American burn-the-fucking-roof-down Jazz. Besides that woeful misstep, this piece is veritable kampf, walking listeners under the umbrella from which all shit runs down:

Hell.
Hell is everything god damned thing.
Everything poison.
Even flowers disgust.
The sky.
The dirt.
The people.
Hell.
Herds of people.
Walking streets.
Awake in my head in hell.
It’s all bad.
It’s all bad.
It’s all bad again.
Again.
It’s all bad again.
It’s all bad.
Get out – my head.

Yes. Who among us can’t relate? Show yourself. I do not like you, and I may not like this record – at all – but it won’t keep me from rightly lionizing the remainder of the discography and abhorring any further aberration. Take a breath, step on back. Letting go is hard to do.

[Stewart Voegtlin]

Khanate
Clean Hands Go Foul
Daymare Recordings
www.daymarerecordings.com
type: reviews    keywords: doom, ambient, lhp023,   

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