Review: Khanate

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Khanate
“Things Viral”
(Southern Lord)

Hmmm…what’s the genre here?  Spoken-word metal?  Doom speak?  Minimalist metal?  It doesn’t really matter what you call it, of course, it only matters what it sounds like.  So, what the hell exactly does it sound like?  Well, with only four tracks, two of which push the twenty minute mark, it sounds like a whole lot of nothing.

Seriously, Khanate have taken a less is more approach to “Things Viral”, letting the ominous silence between the crashing cymbals and macabre vocal theater become an instrument in its own right.  You know how the snow was sort of a character in “Fargo”?  It’s sort of the same thing here, only with the dark, inky silence weaving its way throughout the hellish landscapes created on the blackest of tracks, like “Dead” and “Commuted”.

Not for the faint of heart or even for every fan of metal (I’m not even sure if DICK, the Fix’s resident metalhead would like this thing), “Things Viral” shows that the subtle art of addition via subtraction and the un-heard carry a tangible weight of their own.  Whatever that means.  I just sort of made up words at the end there.  I gotta take a break.