Krallice - Years Past Matter

If there’s anything about Krallice that fits squarely with black metal tradition, it’s the tendency of their music to be overshadowed by the lore surrounding them. Maybe Colin Marston never stabbed anybody, but you’d be forgiven for thinking as much in light of the controversy surrounding the band’s black and tech metal hybrid.

In truth, the debate about the band is neither surprising nor unwarranted. They garnered rapid and emphatic praise from journalists who were rightfully excited about Krallice’s musical concept and instrumental role in an unfolding paradigm. But some could argue that this praise slightly outpaced the band’s compositional ability; a perspective highly dependent on the listener’s context in black metal, tech metal, even death metal. And black metal purists tended to be less impressed by the supposed innovations that Krallice represented. In much the same way that Napalm Death didn’t really invent grind, the purists are usually right. But they’re never vindicated, so it sucks to be one.

Great music never lives in the middle of the road, and wisely Krallice has responded to any deficiencies in their songs by dispensing with conventional attempts to write them. On Years Past Matter you will find no song titles and no lyrics – this is Krallice at their most organic, meandering, and abstract. Previous attempts at verse-chorus formats and vocal hooks on Diotima served only to drive home how ill-at-ease the band was with the format, and the segmented, riff based structures of their previous work often stifled the otherwise brilliant musical interplay by compartmentalizing it into discrete chunks.

It may seem almost paradoxical that Krallice has achieved their most memorable and succinct set of songs by making their music more free flowing and extended. But metal has never been a genre that’s harmed by 10-20 minute epics – it’s the introduction of too many ideas that makes a song seem longwinded. On Years Past Matter, every transition is so seamless that for the first time in their career, Krallice’s songs seem shorter than they are.

Possibly a byproduct of the organic approach to composition, Years Past Matter is also Krallice at their most dynamic. There’s the infectious grooves of track 3, the gentle acoustic theme of 4 devolving into a gorgeous alien soundscape straight out of Ocrilim, the droning noise of 5 and the technical explosion of the progressive closing track. These sonic landmarks do wonders for the flow of the album, and sustain the interspersed tremolo-picking flurries which have always been a trademark of the band. My first thought on hearing all this was that the band had largely dropped the pretense of being a black metal band. But after listening further, I have found that sections of the album strike me as the closest to black metal the band has ever sounded. Even though these sections still aren’t that intense and still aren’t that grim, the musical impact derives from the contrast.

Musically, the band sounds better than they ever have. Marston and Barr’s fretwork has never been in question, but here Weinstein and McMaster really come into their own. If there was one weakness to the band before, it was a slight identity crisis between the black metal and technical parts of their sound. No one is more integral to reconciling that divide than Weinstein, since an underperforming drummer can be the Achilles' heel of a technical metal band, but drone and black metal influences demand a more restrained performance. This time around, Weinstein knows exactly when to play a minimalist blast or double bass groove, and exactly when to ratchet up to a more hyperactive attack. As for McMaster, he continues to develop as a strong third voice in the arrangements, dexterously supplying everything from fuzzy rumbling lines, to dynamic technical runs, to subtle and surprising harmonizations.

A couple other nice touches to this album:

For one, the album layout and artwork is fantastic. It mirrors the music perfectly: reminiscent of the spirit of black metal in certain ways, but modern, abstract, and full of color.

Secondly, on the album there are no song titles at all, but online they are titled with a string of I’s of sufficient number that it’s impossible to tell which song is which unless they are all listed in order. At first I thought this was some obnoxious attempt to be kvlt, but now I’m interpreting it as a statement about listening to the album as a whole. If a song comes up on your music player, it’s effectively impossible to tell which track it is – only that it’s from Years Past Matter. Like the artwork, this titling convention mirrors the music: each song requires the context of the others.

Often the darlings of Pitchfork, often the scorn of Metal Archives, Krallice has responded to all the petty dogmatic outrage and the brainless trendy followers in the best possible way – by eliminating virtually all text from their album and letting the music speak. And speak it does.