Krallice — Crystaline Exhaustion
What’s most impressive about Krallice’s eleventh studio release, “Crystalline Exhaustion” is how much it still sounds like the humble three piece that formed 2007. The word “humble” has counterintuitively described the band since day one, even when expanding their lineup with bassist Nicholas McMaster in 2008 and the advent of their increased musical complexity. Four albums deep and that original Krallice spark, defined by long and complex black metal arrangements, had been built to towering heights. While they were able to perform with a staggering attention to detail and emotional heft, each album was identifiably Krallice, with each musician distinctly present in the mix. It’s that musical legibility that made the band still retain a relentlessly human musculature. No matter what Krallice has always sounded like four impassioned musicians performing in tandem with their own impossibly demanding cosmic scope.
When unexpectedly releasing album five, Krallice ended their three year hiatus and proceeded to set the standard for the rest of their career. Shockingly succinct, self produced albums that explored a novel musical idea with extreme surgical precision. Whether it be technical death metal, lo-fi second wave black metal, or even metallic dungeon synth, each album felt like a band ravenously tunneling into any new sonic aesthetic they were keen to investigate. What’s been puzzling from that middle period has been whether or not the Krallice would continue their experimental streak, or if they’d eventually cohere their disparate stylings into a gestalt musical identity.
“Crystalline Exhaustion” is as much a follow up to their previous record, the synth-laded “Demonic Wealth”, as it is a band harnessing the best aspects of their experimental period and completely reinventing themselves. Those omnipresent synths are the most immediate carryover, now totally integrated into the band’s full musical repertoire. They’re less of a revelation than they were before, basically acting as half of the dueling guitar interplay from albums one through four. But Krallice utilizes their eerie delicateness to incredibly effect, creating the most dynamic and beautiful melodic passages of their entire career. The massive title track in particular starts quiet yet swells into a grand and cosmic symphony, awash with the same emotions that charged their best output from the “Diotima” days, if less blistering than before.
“Crystalline Exhaustion” also marks a shift in the band’s lineup, as nearly every member, barring drummer Lev Weinstein, performs on a new instrument. Colin Marston exclusively plays synthesizers, Mick Barr picks up the bass, and Nicholas McMaster is the album’s sole guitarist. This upheaval isn’t the flashy gimmick it seems by actually downsizing the band’s sound and pairing the de-emphasized guitars with the more spacious synths. Much like “Demonic Wealth”, Marston totally take the lead, but unlike before, he’s supported by a much richer, full band sound. The guitar and bass therefore act as a rhythmic engine which adds a subtle fire and dynamism to the music that most dungeon synth deliberately avoids. If “Demonic Wealth” created doubts that Krallice would veer away from traditional metal compositions, “Crystalline Exhaustion” puts those fears to rest by integrating the black metal sense of urgency in a slightly more palitable context.
While the title track and opener Frost feel like a reimagined version of the band’s early years, “Crystalline Exhaustion”’s instrumental arrangement also lends itself to the band crafting tracks with the neck breaking dissonant agility of their second phase. It’s puzzling concoction on paper, but Marston’s synths act as a musical sinew that coheres that the album’s stylistic direction by lending the tracks an atmospheric spaciousness to more effectively build those classic Krallice crescendos. The middle portion of the album, starting with Telos through Heathen Swill, sound like “Ygg Huur”-era Krallice organically refracted into the band’s less immediate and more atmospheric identity. Even when McMaster’s love of technical death metal threatens to sour the delicate melodies, the solo guitar approach means that these passages are perfectly legible even at their most acerbic. It’s a deft sleight of hand, because the instrumentation lends itself to that skronky tech-death sound, but it’s the way the synths swells within the negative space that satisfyingly coheres the new direction.
Only a band as tight knit and adventurous as Krallice could manage a balance so intricate and refined. It’s impossible to not hear the years of sonic exploration and skill distilled in each song, which ensures that familiarity with Krallice’s past catalog make this album so much more enriching. It’s a real pleasure to hear the band’s various sonic palettes appear in such a strange yet familiar way. Past efforts to cohere the band’s various styles, like “Mass Cathexis”, showed Krallice frankensteining their disparate aesthetics directly onto each other, or equally jarring, between back to back songs. What’s been missing has been a singular, unifying element that brings the emotionality and adventurism of the band’s best work. If “Mass Cathexis” was Krallice’s first stab and grafting their disparate styles together, and “Demonic Wealth” acted as the band’s tentative sortee into a synth-forward approach, then “Crystalline Exhaustion” realizes each of these musical dissertations within the band’s full songwriting scope. Which is doubly impressive, then, is that Krallice went a step forward and synthesized nearly all the unique aspects of their output in the most organic and satisfying way.
