Khost – Many Things Afflict Us, Few Things Console Us
Khost – Many Things Afflict Us, Few Things Console Us
Cold Spring
Release Date: 20/09/24
Running Time: 66:10
Review by Dark Juan
666,666,666/10
Greetings, the few people who read this nonsense. It is Dark Juan here, who is currently slap bang in the middle of a 136-hour working week wrangling recalcitrant young gentlemen. This working week is not bey choice, however. If you have ever worked in social care of any type, you will know that sickness is an all-pervading horror of the industry, because lazy-arse hoofwanking bunglecunts take the decision on a Friday night to have a tour of the local hostelries and then call in sick because they have a fucking hangover, leaving the professional folk like me to pick up the pieces and end up working a million hours because we have a statutory duty of care and the young people I am privileged to look after need care and I can’t just fucking down tools and leave like you lucky 9-5ers. Mrs Dark Juan does display commendable patience with me, and the work I do, however, when really she should threaten to fuck me off unless I change jobs. Still, at least I got to go to Morocco last year on the company ticket, so swings and roundabouts, and I can basically decide to go pretty much wherever I want on the weekend as long as I drag an unwilling child along with me and hand in my receipts at the end of the day.
Enough pointless bellicosity! Let us discuss instead what I currently have defiling the noble Platter of Splatter™. Today, I am listening to the barely believable Lovecraftian horror that is UK (possibly Birmingham) based duo Khost, and their album “Many Things Afflict Us, Few Things Console Us”. Jesus fucking Holy High Christ in a chariot driven sidecar…
Starting with some utterly horrific machine noise on ‘Shard’, the album continues with ‘The Fifth Book of Agrippa’, beginning with some mournful, deeply wailing cello and Eastern sounding vocals over the kind of razorwire guitar sound that you could use to flense flesh from bones. ‘Face’ offers a different facet of Khost besides Black Industrial Grind, being almost like a bastardised EBM song, that has been ground out of all recognition and reformed into something truly shocking to behold. ‘Apotropaic’ dials up the Industrial Metal and rams it slowly into Black Metal, where the music is threatened by levels of endless noise, overpowering fuzz and distortion and it sounds like what Ministry would have sounded like if Irrumator and V.I.T.R.I.O.L decided they were going to take on Big Al’s polished beast instead of hammering the fuck out of listeners with pure rage, whereas the title track proceeds with a beat that is perfectly timed for cyborg warriors to slow march on the advance through a blasted wasteland in search of the last few pure humans to exterminate, targeting systems ticking and whirring as piston-driven legs clank and rattle as they advance inexorably onward.
‘Transfixed’ is a fucking brilliant song, though. Mainly because it has little vignettes in the bass and guitar line that remind Dark Juan of ‘Transmission’ by Joy Division, a band that shares the same cold, melancholy view of the world that Khost does, and this song is the perfect melding of that Mancunian miserablist behemoth of a band with added Industrial grinding and the same sense of isolation.
This is the vital difference that Khost have over other bands playing this kind of Blackened Industrial Metal. Their music is not just full of rage and oppression. It is tempered (Dark Juan might even say honed to a killing edge) with a deep and unfathomable fatalism – it is fury, to be sure, but there is a melancholy and helplessness about the music. It is depersonalisation in action, terrifying noise that rips at the fraying remains of sanity and slams neuro-linguistic programming into your pathetic, jelly-like brain, telling you that there is nothing worth living for apart from to be part of the machine. Forgo your humanity, for it is unproductive and harmful. Conform and accommodate. Otherwise – locate, subvert and terminate…
Also, Khost are British and to have them release a record of this quality and power is fucking fantastic, because it has seemed recently that this kind of extreme music (Black Metal and Industrial, combined with Drone and Doom) had been taken over by the French in the form of Fange, Epectase, Esoctrilihum and P.H.O.B.O.S. There are also moments on this album that bring to mind the likes of Scorn (remember them? Mick Harris’s lot signed when Earache discovered Drum ‘n’ Bass)– where soundscapes are created that have a different kind of power to the roaring of uncovered diesel engines and screaming crankshafts.
Dark Juan has immediately placed Khost in the pantheon of ultimate British Industrial and Metal music along with Pound Land, Machine Mafia, OMNIBDGR/ Omnibadger/ Omnibael and The Machinist.
The production is… very early Black Metal, let’s say – Wiry, sharp, jagged, lo-fi and horribly cold. It is a calculated decision, though and lends the music a disturbing, otherworldly quality that calls into imagination the kind of daemon-infested machinery so beloved of Chaos. There is nothing friendly or warming about the music of Khost. It is a phenomenally misanthropic sound, a slow grind through landscapes with the bleached bones of humans crunching underfoot, the silhouettes of crucified and impaled men and women framed by a sun that gives no warmth and stares like a baleful, unforgiving eye on people scurrying for cover from its infernal rays and the kill squads roaming shattered cities and land that supports no food production. It’s a grim, grey, unrelenting hellscape where humans are cattle and nothing else, corralled in overcrowded, mouldering cities that offer no real shelter, as secret police and roam it at will. What few street lights there are have corpses hanging from their broken necks, with labels pinned to their chests, detailing that the victim has been looting, or pillaging, or stealing food. Breeding is strictly controlled, and there are morality police enforcing eugenics programmes that liquidate the less abled, the autistic and the (perceived as) useless. Resources are scarce if they exist at all, and education is limited to what the people need to know in order to work. There is no art, there is no culture. There is only flesh, to be expended.
In short, Khost share the same Arctic coldness and sense of alienation and loneliness as Godflesh, but come at it from a different angle – where Godflesh present (to my twisted imagination, anyway) as a grizzled crew of post-apocalyptic travellers in a rusted, greying hulk of a transport vehicle that still has well-tuned functional systems and offers protection within, Khost are the opposite. They are the musical equivalent of a mobile fortress, all shades of black, crushing all life beneath clanking, grinding tracks over which overloaded motors arc and fizz and shock, covered in anti-personnel spikes and belching explosive death from large calibre artillery and spitting dum dum bullets from red-hot machine guns. It is coated with blood of dripping gobbets of ruined flesh and the commander intent only on wholesale destruction.
To try to bring this flood of syllabification to some kind of conclusion then – I will be playing this album to death, even though it is as far from easy listening as you can get. It is deeply challenging, and this album, with its EIGHTEEN tracks is a mammoth piece of work, yet never sounds forced or with any filler music. It is just pure, unadulterated hatred. If you enjoy music that sounds like the whirring and grinding of machinery on endless grey, pain-saturated vistas of unrelenting horror and misanthropia then you are going to “enjoy” Khost mightily. The music is staggering, not through complexity, but through the sheer, faceless scale of it.
It is acres of broken glass and ruined industrial districts.
It is the aural equivalent of blown-up hospitals.
It is one of the most isolated-sounding, dehumanised records I have heard.
It is literally the soundtrack to the death of all hope.
“Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here…”
On that cheerful note, the Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System has skipped into the room with a cheery and irreverent “Hiya!” and has stopped dead in its tracks wondering why Dark Juan is weeping and slicing his arms open to the bone and ruining the carpet with his claret. It awards Khost 666,666,666/10 for a record that is staggeringly powerful and alienating and heavier than an entire convoy of 40-foot articulated trucks being driven by salad dodgers before running for its life as a throwing knife buries its blade in the door frame next to it, mere inches from the eye it was aimed at.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Shard
02. The Fifth Book of Agrippa
03. Death Threat
04. Face
05. Apotropaic
06. Many Things Afflict Us, Few Things Console Us
07. Transfixed
08. Incinerator
09. Hands In Broken Time
10. Death Car
11. Reading Between The Lines
12. L2L6
13. Cheapside
14. Define The Edge of Someone
15. Overrun
16. TVSB
17. Death Threat – Berenices Remix
18. Yellow Light – Adrian Stainburner Remix
LINE-UP:
Andy Swan
Damian Bennett
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.