Industrial noise? Hell yeah. The fifth album from Birmingham-based industrial/doom metal band KHOST, which we learn ‘sees the band forging new and at times nightmarish territories, alongside their signature walls of detuned guitar, corroded percussion and VHS atmospherics’ tears the eardrums with a blast of harsh electronic noise with the twenty-three second intro track, ‘Shard’. It’s an appropriate title, as it has lasting effects, like splinters perforating the drums and carving into the canals. With this mush abrasion right up front, you find yourself staggering back a few steps, reeling from the short but brutal assault.
The accompanying bio explains that ‘Inspiration for many of the tracks came from countless live shows and even soundcheck experiments in which extreme, harsh electronics evolved, as did punk/early industrial tempos, all of which were then fused into the DNA of Many Things Afflict Us Few Things Console Us.’ And it’s harsh, aright. But it’s more than about harsh electronics. This is raw, dingy, dirty. It’s not a criticism when I write that this sounds horrible. It’s meant to, and it’s relentless in its sonic and psychological torture.
‘The Fifth Book of Agrippa’ plunges into the murkiest of black metal territories, dragging the listener into a hellish abyss, driven by clattering metallic percussion with washes of cymbal and the doomiest of bass tones as eastern-flavoured vocals twist serpentine around mournful strings to conjure a mystical but ultimately bleak sonic setting. Mournful cello courtesy of Jo Quail add a layer of lugubriousness to the soul-flagellating experience. It makes for a long and agonizing six and a half minutes. It tapers down to silence in billows of Sunn O)))-like distortion.
‘Death Threat’ arrives straight from the Godflesh template and is nothing short of the sound of pure punishment and it’s absolutely flames of hell fucking brutal. Elsewhere on the album, we stumble and lurch across brain-shredding loops and ear-destroying, annihilistic, decimating guitars. The vocals – processed and beyond ruin – are almost buried in the barrage of noise.
To return to the bio, we find ‘Khost remark: “We hoped that the experience would be something like venturing into an off-limits wing of some gallery after-hours, with each turn more disorientating than where you just were”. It is a bit like that. It’s also wholly unpleasant and difficult to navigate. The texture of the album, whether it’s the more technoindustrial tunes or the raw, ravaging guitar works, or even the gothy ‘Transfixed’, it’s all murky, the scuzzy, dampened sound creating an effect of something corroded, degraded, rusted, damply subterranean. The machine is broken and KHOST are clinging on, wild and feverish as they soundtrack a ruined world in the wake of a collapse. ‘Apotropaic’ is all the overload, a nuclear bomb detonating in your speakers in a mass of ruinous distortion.
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Whatever angle they take, consolation is absolutely not on offer here. This is an album for the end of times. This is an album for now.
It’s worth noting that, as they state, ‘The CD and the vinyl are different beasts. The CD is reinforced with 7 extra tracks including ADRIAN STAINBURNER’s incredible remix of ‘Yellow Light’ featuring STEPHEN MALLINDER (Cabaret Voltaire, Wrangler) on vocals, and BERENECES adding his signature deep, dark D&B sound to the track ‘Death Threat’. The LP editions feature a different mix by Khost especially for vinyl.’
How different the vinyl mix is, I’m unable to report, but can say with confidence that the bonus material on the digital and CD editions are worthwhile, and the quality is sustained throughout with nothing one could realistically describe as filler, although it takes a strong constitution to endure almost a second album’s worth of this kind of sustained brutality.
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