Krallice

The first favor I must ask of you is to imagine me as Garfield the hideously unfunny cartoon cat. If currently active bands were food I like to eat, then Krallice would be my lasagna. Everyone knows Garfield likes lasagna.

Allow that statement settle in for a brief moment. Once the aforementioned sentiment has had proper time to stew (hint: Garfield's consistently unimpressed demeanor truly emphasizes that he detests just about everything except lasagna), prepare yourself for more blabbing about how these whiteboys in Krallice killed it once again with their latest record Years Past Matter...

These years of living as a Midwestern urbanite have undoubtedly ravaged me inside and out. My boyish features have been chiseled away to the point where my body resembles nothing more than a hardened, flaky shell of pasty flesh and matted hair. The part of my head responsible for producing human emotion feels comparably the same. Everywhere I turn there is some dickass making shitty dubstep crossover remixes of music I couldn't stand in the first place, but somehow managed to make sound even worse when "mashed up". With these horrid realities in mind, once and a while I come across a band that just ABSOLUTELY fucking NAILS IT and gives birth to music which taps into some sort of hidden reservoir of sound that is simply a joy to soak in. Krallice is one of those bands and they have been on an absolute roll since 2008. Call their jams what you want: a metal-ized version of My Bloody Valentine or a guitar-noodlicious spinoff of Burzum. Generalizations, comparisons, and summations aside, I feel reborn as both a human being and listener.

Personal dramatics aside, let us get on to the album itself. Years Past Matter isn't a major departure from anything previous the band has done, but I can say with the utmost confidence that this is a good thing. I'm not going to get into the overplayed dialogue of how this record deviates from traditional black metal and how *wooOooOooOOOhhhhh* (ghost noises) purists sneer at its mere existence. Those topics have been beat to death and regurgitated by about a million other music blogs. While any listener who has heard Krallice's previous work should be able to immediately identify the band from the new tracks, this latest iteration is simply a new flavor (I liken it to an X-treme zesty ranch) variation to an existing, well-established recipe of deliciousness.

Like most of Krallice's music, there is simply a lot of a content to be had here. The long, winding, densely-layered instrumentals bring almost an overabundance of information to process. The true paradox causing personal amazement is that said complexity and barrage of sound ends up being (borderline-miraculously) quite easy to zone out to. Additionally, while I often dismiss the non-musical aspects of aesthetic a band possesses, Krallice has remarkably upped the visual weirdness with this one. They have departed from the traditional "woods and natural landscapes" artwork into the realm of SPACE, BRAH: THE FINAL FRONTIER. Plus, all of the song titles are literally an increasing array of vertical lines.

ALLOW ME TO SUMMATE: THEY'VE DONE IT AGAIN, BRAH.