"I'd love to be a nature band, but unfortunately we live in New York." So said guitarist/vocalist Mick Barr in Pitchfork's interview with Krallice, his black metal band with Colin Marston and Lev Weinstein. He was referring to black metal's typical obsession with nature, given its origins in Scandinavia's rugged landscape. But Krallice is a nature band. It's just that New York's "nature" is concrete, glass, numbers, and dollars. Barr's and Marston's main gigs are Orthrelm and Behold...The Arctopus, respectively, two bands that showcase mind-boggling technicality. Their "calculator metal" aspect colors Krallice, which is precise, neurotic, yet powerful-- just like mathematician Maximillian Cohen, protagonist of Pi, Darren Aronofsky's Kabbalah/math thriller set in New York. "For fuck's sake, how does a Jew end up listening to Burzum?" Weinstein rhetorically asked. Easy: Cohen would have jammed hard on Krallice.
From their first note, it's obvious how unlike most other black metal they are. Barr's agonized yell isn't the usual witchy screech. The guitar tone nods to black metal's trebly buzz, but it also has rich midrange. Instead of paper-thin walls of cymbals, these drums have heft, blessed by a naturalistic analog recording. No Satanism, Odinism, or nationalism here-- a few mysterious phrases replace printed lyrics: "Solar winds breed laceration"; "The lesser gods have taken their withered placement back from man." Most saliently, the guitar work isn't the typical minor chord that's moved up and down. These are complex, abstract lines, often spinning away from each other in counterpoint. In "Cnestorial", guitars cross at skewed angles, cutting the tonality loose in an indeterminate key. Eventually, dreamy sheets of Rothko-esque chords envelop the tune. "Timehusk" flutters with free jazz skronk, then resolves into straight-ahead thrash. "Forgiveness in Rot" weaves lines picked at light speed with curtain-like chords that billow open and shut. It's ambient music at 200 bpm.
The tremolo picking and blastbeats are unmistakably black metal, but this record otherwise relocates the Norwegian art form to Mars. Two American precedents do exist for Krallice: Weakling and Wolves in the Throne Room. Weakling were more emotional, and Wolves in the Throne Room are more lush, but both have stretched what essentially began as Satanic punk rock into 10-minute textural meditations. Krallice have now added math to the equation. The results are hard to grasp, but strangely addictive. Krallice would have made a marvelous soundtrack to Pi.
