KRALLICE

Since Go Be Forgotten, Krallice have been going through a big evolution, with Colin Marston adding keyboards and dark synth textures to the band's progressive black metal sound. His various side projects have seen him experiment with spacey ambient soundscapes, and to take those and stick them in Krallice's work has established their sound for the second decade of their career.

Porous Resonance Abyss seems like the next natural step after Crystalline Exhaustion and Psychagogue, and even then they continue to evolve. This is another sharp departure from their roots, sounding more like straight-up prog metal with elements of space rock. The synths are front and centre, giving it a feel akin to 80's Rush. They haven't fully abandoned black metal though, as there are still blast beats and tremolo picked guitars, but they aren't the main focus. They wanted an atmosphere, and they delivered. Also, it's entirely instrumental, which is another benefit. No harsh vocals to shake the listener out of the immersion, letting the melodies carry you away.

It's a 43-minute, 4-part journey through outer space that warps and wefts through prog metal, black metal, space rock, and chilling ambient. Unlike anything Krallice have done before, and another welcome installment to the prog-black gods' oeuvre. There's nowhere else for them to go but up into the stratosphere and beyond.

Oh yeah, and awesome cover art. Love those purples.

Krallice, a New York-based quartet, are stalwarts of the experimental/progressive black metal scene. From their self-titled debut in 2008 to now, they have consistently put out high-quality music, and each album has had its own distinctive hallmarks.

Crystalline Exhaustion is the band's eleventh full-length release. I haven't listened to their previous album (2021's Demonic Wealth), but I did enjoy their 2020 release, Mass Cathexis. Crystalline Exhaustion continues in their general vein of spaced-out, proggy black metal. 

Opening the album is the 10-minute "Frost". Thumping drums, slowly booming bass, and an airy gasp of a synth pad work together to foster an icy, otherworldly atmosphere. After a couple meditative minutes, the song blasts off into energetic shredding. The synth pad adds a sense of tonal continuity with the opening amid the tremolo picking and frenetic drumming. The song's midsection takes a decidedly spooky turn which allows the bass some time in the spotlight. "Frost" ends similarly to how it opened, with slow, pounding percussion and a breathy synthesizer.

Despite enjoying the composition overall, I'm not wild about the production. I've now listened to this album on two different sets of speakers, and it comes off sounding a bit shallow on both. This is, unfortunately, an issue which plagues the whole album.

"Telos" follows, and it immediately jumps into the action. The shredding coupled with the ethereal, plinking synths reminds me strongly of Kayo Dot's most recent album. The band skillfully alternates between moments of technical flashiness and more typical black metal riffage.

The synthesizers in the opening passage of "Heathen Swill" are the eeriest yet on the album, and they mesh wonderfully with Krallice's scouring metal. "Archlights" starts in a similar manner, and that song's middle has some surprisingly laid-back instrumental interplay.

Next is "Dismal Entity", which opens on a high-energy, nearly thrash-like riff which is quite bass-forward. The bass shines throughout this song, often being high in the mix, with no shortage of great licks and fills.

Crystalline Exhaustion ends on its 14-minute title track. This song opens with mournful synth strings and takes its time. Lightly-plucked bass underpins these gentle moments. After over four minutes, the song begins to pick up steam. Bass and percussion amp up the tempo as chiming synth notes ring out over the top. By the song's midpoint, it's finally resembling metal as the screeched vocals enter. This is a deeply satisfying buildup, and I once again feel the need to compliment their choice in synth tones.

Krallice's latest album is a solid entry into their discography. Despite being underwhelmed by the production, the compositions are strong enough to overcome it. If you're a fan of cosmic black metal, this is definitely worth your time.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2022/02/16/album-review-krallice-crystalline-exhaustion/

It hasn't even been six months and Krallice have put out another album. While this isn't the shortest gap between two Krallice albums, it's another welcome surprise. This album follows in the same vein as their previous, Crystalline Exhaustion, where the band have switched instruments. However, it seems that there's an even greater emphasis on the keyboards, with Colin Marston playing with different tones throughout the four winding songs. Arrokoth Trireme is where this experimentation reaches its peak, culminating in a space ambient coda reminiscent of the latest album from another Marston project, Indricothere. He also adds more percussion on Reprisals of Destiny, making Lev's drumming sound even more chaotic. And as on every album, Mick and Nick are in fine form with the complex chord progressions we know and love.

I'm really glad the band are continuing in this direction. The future of Krallice looks brighter than ever.

Krallice switch things up on their eleventh album: Colin's on keyboards, Nick's on guitar, and Mick's on bass. If you think it would become a big discordant mess, you'd be surprisingly wrong. The keyboards actually give it a more atmospheric quality that add interesting textures to their black metal sound. The variety of vocal styles is also a plus. Sometimes when there's a long synth passage (such as on the title track) it ]adds to the cold, icy vibe the cover artwork gives off. It did get very frigid outside today so I'll put this album to the test when I take my walk tonight.

If you liked what Krallice were doing on Go Be Forgotten, give this album a shot.

KRALLICE began in 2007 and was masterminded by two ultimate guitar nerds. The first was Colin Marston who had just graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in music technology in 2004. He soon would put the band Behold? The Arctopus on the map for being a highly innovative progressively oriented technical metal band and soon would also display his bass playing skills in the metal trio Dysrhythmia. The other half of the KRALLICE equation was in the form of Mick Barr, who has become one of the best known avant-garde guitarists of the 21st century with such bizarre and twisted musical concoctions such as Orthrelm, Ocrilim, Octis and Crop-Tech. These two never planned a band together but decided to collaborate to test the waters and ended up liking the music so much that they turned it into a more permanent project, thus KRALLICE was born.

Both of these guitarists have been known for their hyper-technical math metal since their beginning and together they create one of those larger than life bombastic furies unlike their contemporaries. They wasted no time creating their eponymously titled debut and released it in 2008. Barr handles vocals, guitar and bass and Marston on guitar and bass as well. Lev Weinstein joins the duo to perform equally compelling drum antics and a few additional vocal parts were performed by Nick McMaster. The debut KRALLICE album is characterized by a pummeling and brutal raw black metal sound that adopts the classic second wave lo-fi approach with many feedback and reverb affects added for that extra dimension of devilish distortion. Barr and Marston have notoriously utilized multi-layered guitar effects for their surreal bombastic and brutal dual guitar metal attacks and all those tricks and trinkets debut here as well.

While noticeably rawer and less produced than future albums, KRALLICE engaged in some of the most technically challenging black metal that has been released with a veritable influence coming from the San Francisco based Weakling which only released one highly revered album "Dead As Dreams." Like Weakling, KRALLICE performs dissonant speed of light riffs with a reversing atmospheric presence that zigzag through surreal time signature frenzies and engage in an extremely progressive technical prowess that provides the ultimate example of "difficult musical listening." The vocal style is muffled screams that emerge from beneath the bantering din and the drums were tuned as low as possible and recorded from a distance. Another trick is that the bass was played through two amps with different effects to allow a strange merging of different distortions.

Technically speaking, KRALLICE is on the top of their game with all the crazy antics and orotund creative extremities whizzing by at a million miles per hour however for whatever reason, the music of KRALLICE has never been able to inspire me beyond the technical admirations that they present. While taking every liberty to expand the lengthy compositional approach of what Weakling began including a sprawling 15 minute plus closing track, KRALLICE simply lacks interesting compositions as they all sound quite samey throughout, a trait that haunts their music to the present day. While bands like Deathspell Omega and Gorguts amongst others have found a thematic approach as to wrap their technical chops around, KRALLICE on the other hand sounds very much like a technically oriented band that forces the themes onto the desired calculations. This debut is interesting in how it creates musical textures and timbres hitherto unexplored but like all of KRALLICE's lauded works fails to inspire repeated visits.

'Ygg Huur' - Krallice (75/100)

I have never quite understood the backlash against Krallice. Their airy contemporaries are rightly accused of missing the point when it comes to circumventing the black metal genre's essential darkness, but I don't think Krallice have ever shied away from discomfort. Quite the opposite, in fact-- the band's exceptional degree of technical musicianship has opened new routes to stifling anxiety that would have remained closed to a more stylistically 'pure' outfit. Sharp, angular tech riffing, like something out of one of Penderecki's worst nightmares, sounds all the more jarring when it's dropped in the context of a genre that tends to favour pairing its longer song structures with minimalism and introspective atmosphere. With that said, I can definitely see Krallice as not being a band for everyone, particularly those who have struggled with the bandmembers' other projects-- namely Orthrelm and Behold the Arctopus.

At the end of the day, Krallice has always struck me as a progressive metal band first and foremost; one that decided to don the blackened veil and roughly adhere to the customs of black metal. The penchant for technically challenging and cerebral music has remained a constant, but it hasn't been until Ygg huur that Krallice sound like they're finally dropping the black metal pretence, showing themselves as they really are. The layman may ask: Is it still really black metal? Regardless whether it is, or whether Krallice are now better described as prog or tech metal, it is clear that Ygg huur marks a change of pace for a remarkably consistent band.

While Krallice's career marked an audible shift towards increasingly sophisticated leaps in composition, I feel like Ygg huur shows the band switching tracks in more ways than one. Krallice now sound more along the lines of Gorguts (for whom Krallice's own Colin Marston has played a significant role these past few years) than the 'angular black metal' tag I had them pegged for. Roughly half as long as any of the meaty albums that came before it, Krallice has meant to condense the same number of ideas into a fraction of the time. This shift comes as a surprise, but if you listen for earlier moments where the band's true passion lay, it is fairly easy to see this as a continuation of what they've been up to in the past.

When all is said, Krallice has become more like the other bands these musicians are part of. Between Orthrelm, Behold the Arctopus and the comparatively restrained Dysrhythmia, these guys are no strangers to jarring, calculated compositions. Don't be fooled by the album's length; not one minute of Ygg huur's thirty six are wasted on getting to the point. The songwriting is starts and stops abruptly, and the music is fiendishly dense. Indeed, it's sometimes hard to know when one song ends and another begins. Ygg huur is forged on a common frequency of anxiety-inducing technique and claustrophobic atmosphere. Normally I'd hold it against an album for being relatively 'samey' (especially when the style is unwelcoming by default) but there's the sense with Ygg huur that Krallice have placed each and every note where it is with careful forethought.

Most technical music is impressive by default in a vaguely cerebral way, but the real quality is distinguished by how a listener's appreciation will kindle or fester given repeated listenings. In this, Ygg huur represents a strong case of an album that had me sold from the first listen onwards and has held my appreciation at a relatively consistent level from there. It's not that Ygg huur doesn't benefit from extra time or even patience, but Krallice's tightness is instantly evident to an nigh-overwhelming degree. The band's musicianship is easily the best thing on Ygg huur, and even if their compositions lack the twists and turns to make them memorable unto themselves, there's a palpable chemistry here you very seldom hear in a metal band. Marston and Mick Barr are a symmetrical hivemind of a guitar duo, whose tangents always sound finetuned to echo one another. Lev Weinstein's drums are appropriately busy, and Nicholas McMaster's thick bass presence virtually begs for a slew of tech-death comparisons.

Krallice have shown their true colours here, I think. Any reservations someone may have had towards their place in black metal may be somewhat justified, if only for the realization now that Krallice sound so much more like themselves once they've done away with the most apparent traits of that sound. Ygg huur's singular focus on cerebral technique is, in a way, more limited than the sprawling format of past albums, but it's nonetheless impressive to hear a band highlighting their best strengths as such. I hesitate to name another band in recent memory that lends an equal sense of weight to their own technical manoeuvres. Krallice took a calculated risk with Ygg huur. To my satisfaction as a fan of the band, it paid off.

Originally written for Heathen Harvest Periodical.

Krallice's 'Years Past Matter' is the fourth album from this very obscure and totally uncompromising progressive black metal band from New York City. This is an album which grabs you by the scruff of the neck and never lets go or gives you much time to breathe. The music on this record is utterly suffocating at times.

This is the only album I've heard by Krallice, but I'm led to believe that their other three studio albums are very similar to 'Years Past Matter'. One thing is for certain - Krallice are definitely a band for the brave listener. Without an extensive background of listening to extreme metal this might be dismissed purely as noise. To be honest even with an extensive background of black and death metal experience I consider this album to be right on the edge of my listening threshold.

The music here is extremely dense. It is primal, raw and totally crushing. The guitars form an impenetrable wall of sound made from ultra-fast tremolo picking in true black metal style. In some ways it reminds me of the early work of Ulver, but taken to its extremes. At first the music in 'Years Past Matter' might appear totally unstructured - and in many ways it is. How they can play this live I'll never know - but the diligent listener will also find some really amazing musical sections buried within the cacophony. But reaching them can prove a challenge! Pressed for a genre I'd probably class this as extreme avant garde progressive black metal - what a mouthful!...

As I've said the biggest problem I have with the album is the meandering lack of structure. There aren't really any hooks to pull you into this one. Maybe I'm getting old and today's young extreme metal fan will think this record to be pretty tame. Its had perhaps a half-a-dozen spins, which isn't really enough to write a review from but I'm not entirely sure I want to listen to this album any-more. It might be the most amazing extreme prog-metal release ever but I've run out of patience to try and decipher the music on offer here.

Anyway, to try and assign a rating to this album is going to be tough. Its definitely not a 1 or 2 star record as the music here is definitely very skilful, but I also can't give it more than 3 stars. There are clever moments here, and who knows this might grow on me some more if I can continued to listen enough times but as for right now I'll give this one 3-stars... But I'd definitely encourage anyone into extreme metal to try it out, you never know - it might click for you and become an instant masterpiece!