Khanate
Clean Hands Go Foul

I didn't expect it; that is, I didn't expect to have another moment with a new Khanate album in my hands. I saw them dissolve, and with them went my enormous desire to see them live, my desire to test again, and again and again my level of endurance caused by these four, truly insane individuals (perhaps geniuses) who had already tortured me, embalmed me, psychologically destroyed me with 3 other works, those 3 works that are their progression, their way of describing themselves and describing what surrounds them to the entire world.

Instead, here I am, with another of their monuments in hand, alas unable to see them live anyway, but oh well, I already thank them for giving me this last hour of (non)music, of deconstruction, of despair, and for making me feel what I no longer felt since that distant capture & release (4 years have passed, but it feels like a lifetime).

"Clean hands go foul" is evil, just like the other 3 works, it is the moment when everything ends, the final scream of pain of a man on the brink of death, suffering for most of it, who closes the curtain with an almost demonic curse on the world; it is something truly impeccable, monstrous, unthinkable, no one like them has pushed so far, so deep into the abyss, so beyond the pillars of Hercules of a way of understanding music that has no equals.

There is no music here, what they did in the past does not exist here, it is all dismantled, destroyed, there is no things viral nor the self-titled debut nor capture and release for that matter, there is an evolution towards something that is at the limit, it comes from those three chapters, but thereafter nothing; there is an almost romantic sense of describing the end, and it is understood immediately, from that "Wings from spine" that opens the work: a scream, painful notes becoming cascades, of noises, of screeches, of obsessive tortured percussion, confusing visions clouded by Dubin's sharp, ungraceful voice, a primary source of desolation and despair, a fullness that had never existed before in their music, after which it begins to collapse, to fall beneath their feet, and ours. Everything begins to immobilize already from the very dark "Clean my heart", perhaps the track most open to the band's past, and most suited to the genre done so far by ours, until that "Every god damn things" which will be remembered as the heaviest track (in atmosphere, not in power) and most suffocating of all our productions: 32 minutes of immobility, of slow steps, of noises, of screams, of a palpable sensation of death, like an electroencephalogram that suddenly flatlines after terrifying jolts; 32 minutes of tears, in which you almost see nothingness, touch nothing, and brush against evil in a vortex difficult to manage and sustain but which definitively closes the career of our guys, in silence, with screams again, and then, the end.

The Khanate are this, 4 guys, united to create one of the heaviest musics ever conceived, and now they are no more, this is the swan song, and they end here, with the last gasps, forever.

Excessive, colossal, inconceivable, sometimes unsustainable, they are everything that no one had the courage to be, and they gave the world what no one had the courage to give: Stephen O'Malley, James Plotkin, Tim Wyskida, Alan Dubin, 4 men who were able to describe death and let us savor it, who were able to push even further the limits of a genre, doom, even further, toward truly original and profound territories.

Thanks boys...

P.S.: The CD in question comes from the same recording sessions as the previous "Capture & release", that is 2005, and only today has seen the light.