(Sludge, Drone, Doom) Khanate - It's Cold When Birds Fall From The Sky (Live) - 2005, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Listening to Khanate is always frightening. The tortured screams and inhuman guitar shrieks, the menacing drums, brooding atmosphere, and above all the agonizing, drawn out slowness and breakdown-inducing heaviness make for a deeply unsettling listen. To be frank, playing Khanate in a public place is probably a form of terrorism these days and, if not, it should be.
Moving on to the album at hand, Khanate's release on the super limited Archive label. 3 tracks, the CD contains live versions of Capture, Release and Pieces of Quiet, recorded on their It's Cold When Birds Fall From the Sky tour. I hadn't heard Capture and Release before, but good things had been said about them, so I was interested to judge for myself. Due to the length of the songs (they all last in excess of 15 minutes) it is difficult to describe individual moments in the album, so instead I will just try and give an overall impression of each track.
I can safely say that the band have lost none of their extreme, fear-inducing sound. Kicking off with Capture, from the initial angry yells to the final, lingering chord this song does not let up for a second. Every moment is used to full effect, reverberating around your speakers and into your ears, gradually eating away at your sanity. After the eighteen and a half minutes the track lasts, you will feel as if you have been wrenched out of your comfortable seat, had a hole drilled gradually into your head and your brains slowly allowed to leak out, drowned for several minutes and then dumped back into your chair, upside down. This should prepare you nicely for what is to come next.
It would seem impossible at this point to make things any more painfully slow, but Khanate seem constantly to be trying to make things that little bit more extreme, adding that little bit of extra uncomfortable feeling for the listener. Release, after a lengthy intro of unintelligable whispers, rasping bass and complaining guitar, gradually builds and builds and builds, all the time becoming more threatening and oppressive, almost without you noticing, until at last you realise that you have been enveloped by the piece, and swallowed whole. This song is not as massively heavy as some in Khanate's discography, but the atmosphere it creates is pretty powerful. Still, I think this is probably the weakest of the three tracks on the album - at times you can almost forget it's playing. It isn't so much that it gets boring, more that you can slowly get used to it
Pieces of Quiet has always been one of my favourite Khanate pieces, and this live recording does not disappoint. There's more distortion and feedback than in the original, and the vocals aren't as clear, but if anything this makes the whole thing sound more chaotics and hellish. Not missing are the prominent long, heavy drones. Sometimes when listening to Khanate it's possible to become overwhelmed by the vocals and screeching, and you forget just how utterly crushing the low end is. That's not likely to happen on this song. A great finisher, and I'm not really sure whether I prefer the live or the studio version.
The overall production on this release is very good. The sound is clear and unmuffled, unlike on so many live albums. In fact, it's actually quite hard to tell that this is a live CD at all. One minor complaint on an otherwise excellent release is that at times either the vocals (on No Joy) or the drums (on Capture) could have been mixed slightly higher, but even this isn't really too bad.
Other bands play styles similar to the Khanate sound, notably Stumm, Bunkur, Moss, Unearthly Trance and Atavist, and I believe Plotkin has in fact helped several of these bands with production. None, however, reach the same level of paranoid and pessimistic devastation as the musical kraken that is Alan Dubin, Stephen O'Malley, James Plotkin and Tim Wyskida. When people ask me for band recommendations, I do not often mention Khanate. The music they make is neither happy nor really very melodic, and doesn't appear to be for the enjoyment of either the band or their listeners. This CD in particular is not joyful; if I were putting together a list of the top 10 feel-good albums of all time, I doubt it'd make the list. At a glance, its impact would mainly seem to be shock at the agonizing sound the band create. Despite this, Khanate are thoroughly worth listening to, though perhaps not too often. When I first got their debut CD it stayed in my player for weeks, and slowly lost some of its power. After a couple of months without listening to the band, Things Viral was just a traumatic reminder as the first album, and this is again the case with their Archive release.

Alan Dubin - Voice
Stephen O'Malley - Guitar
James Plotkin - Bass, Synth
Tim Wyskida - Drums