Krallice - Demonic Wealth

[The Mollusk]

Devised and created remotely during 2020's isolation periods, with all drums and vocals recorded on a phone (and the vocals allegedly, hilariously recorded "in a car near a swamp"), Demonic Wealth is Krallice's most expansive and confounding album to date.

The ingredients of black metal are here - the squalling distorted guitars, the chaotic rattling drums, the frost bitten vocals - but these elements have been fragmented through a lens of disconcerting new age/kosmiche synths to create a uniquely unsettling atmosphere. The double kick drums are filtered back to a distant rumble and the well-trodden unyielding roar of trad black metal is reduced to a howling, weird abyss of dark introspection.

That's not to say it won't still rip your tits off though; tracks like "Mass for the Strangled" and "Disgust Patterns" go in hard and nasty, but the widening expanse of their song forms on this album adds another layer of abstraction and bewilderment which is fascinating. The percussion on this album is totally off the wall, which is cool considering all of the songwriting was initiated by the drummer.

As always with Krallice, you can hear the members' other projects in their sound (they've been in Gorguts, Behold the Arctopus and Orthrelm, to name a few) but their combined wealth of technical prowess is never naval gazing or pretentious. It's just brilliant and captivating throughout.

Their constantly evolving and uncompromising artistic approach quickly cemented them as my favourite black metal band on discovering them in recent years, but this album is something else entirely. If you want to hear something genuinely new and innovative, Krallice are your guys, and this album is an exceptional example of their talents.

Stil

Mass for the Strangled

[sevendaughters]

i thought Mick Barr's hands were fecked? anyway will give this a blast. memories of trying to enjoy that Orthrelm album that was just a 45 minute riff.

[The Mollusk]

That album is LOADS of riffs in 45 mins. It's amazing, I fuckin love Orthrelm.

What's up with his hands? That's tragic if true, he's an incredible guitarist.

[Brundle-Fly]

Stil

Sounds like a heavier version of Telstar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryrEPzsx1gQ

[Dirty Boy]

I've only listened to it once, so not really enough to unpack whatever the hell is going on, but my first thought was "fucking hell, the drums sound awful" before i read that they were indeed apparently recorded on a phone and damned if after a couple of songs i was starting to tune into the abstract, spacey nature of it and realised it works perfectly for the music.

It doesn't sound like any of the other Krallice albums i've listened to (at this point Diotima, Years Past Matter and Ygg huur) so good on them for changing it up at least. I'm not sure it'll be something i go back to that often though.

I don't know Orthrelm. Is it more twiddly than heavy?

[The Mollusk]

Yeah the way they've got those drums to sound not shite is impressive. The atmosphere of this album is properly unique.

What's your favourite of the other Krallice joints? My first listen was Diotima and "Litany of Regrets" is one of the best heavy songs I've ever heard, the way the guitars are heavily compressed under the blast beats is incredible, it's like a runaway train into hell right up to the strobing death knell final moments. Recently I've fallen madly in love with "Ygg Huur" and "Mass Cathexis" for their madly technical/abstract song structures which I find thrilling in the extreme.

Orthrelm are a drum/guitar two piece. Their first album is a collection of songs which are so twiddly and mad that it's hard to discern any sort of proper structure but it is there. The second album is one long piece but it's all stitched together separate performances, the band wanted to create something that expanded on the limits of heavy metal shredding and soloing and the result is a bizarre, hypnotic assault of repetitious rocking out. They're both amazing!

[Shaky]

Wasn't familiar with these chaps but really enjoying this album. The production works beautifully. I'm not a huge black metal fan, but there's lots of interest within.

Amusingly, I just googled Mick Barr and it says he's 121 years old!

[sevendaughters]

That album is LOADS of riffs in 45 mins. It's amazing, I fuckin love Orthrelm.

What's up with his hands? That's tragic if true, he's an incredible guitarist.

I finally looked this up. He had bad carpal tunnel in the 00s but seems like he's beyond it now.

[The Mollusk]

Thank fuck for that!

[sevendaughters]

Took me a while Nags but leader in AOTY for me here. The recording is really weird, always seems like it is disappearing down the road.

[The Mollusk]

It's amazing ain't it? Keep going back to it and having serious wtf staring off into the carpet moments, really captivating, innovative and genuinely weird, which is hard to come by in modern music, especially metal.

[Magnum Valentino]

Stewart Lee has mentioned this in the same list that's caused so much fuck over in Comedy Chat.

[The Mollusk]

Stewart Lee has mentioned this in the same list that's caused so much fuck over in Comedy Chat.

Nice! Glad to see Krallice getting wider recognition and exposure.

In case youse missed it, this album topped my extreme metal advent calendar and was certainly my favourite album of 2021. I still can't think of anything else I've ever heard that sounds like it.

[sevendaughters]

tried to pick this album up a bunch of times but not stocked anywhere real, absolute travesty