Review Summary: Completed cave drawings.
When Krallice released
Crystalline Exhaustion back in January this year I can’t help but say I was a bit miffed. I mean, Krallice is
prolific no doubt but for all the band’s kinks,
Psychagogue seems to be the natural successor to the band’s
Crystalline Exhaustion, or in the very least a sum of
Demonic Wealth’s parts, minus the swamp noises. Prolificacy wasn’t the issue…I just wasn’t ready for more Krallice just yet.
On the back of that rather nothing segue it’s worth mentioning that
Psychagogue is less relevant in the recent releases pile of twenty-twenty-two goodies and yet being the second of Krallice’s releases this year it’s likely that it will be understated of the two. Unfairly, because
Psychagogue is the better of the pair. At just under forty minutes Krallice’s newest export is sustainably brief. Overwrought, long compositions are compressed into affordable bite-sized swathes of proggy black metal goodness, but we’re still looking at tracks that aren’t afraid to swelter under or over the ten minute mark. Curious isn’t it? Somehow Krallice has become illusionists, tricking the listener into a sleight of ear that bends what actually is into what Krallice wants it to be. The album’s opening title track and “Deliberate Fog” pace over scrabbling foundations and Marston’s ever-present sound mixing. Feverish riffs flurry under an atmosphere that just seems a little too far away. “Arrokoth Trireme”, the record’s longest track of thirteen minutes, helps define
Psychagogue as a record that brings Krallice back to earth after the smallest journeys through space. More akin to the swamp-led spontaneity of
Demonic Earth than the mysterious voids of
Crystalline Exhaustion. The track itself broils in shimmering crescendo, a build of atmosphere that eventually marches into place. The cinematic response acts like a war cry for the band’s die-hard following, holding hands with the dulcimer black metal furor more akin to the shrieks and snarls of the genre’s prominent first wave. In typical fashion, Krallice resorts to the avant garde crutch of the twinkle, and of the chime—and uses it like an oar guiding a boat down a gentle stream. In terms of dichotomy, it’s a pleasant break from the visceral, fury and weirder nuance that peppers the entire of the record without detaching the music from what’s clearly the modern Krallice formula.
“Reprisals of Destiny” closes the record with a sense of pomp, celebrating the band’s clearer, heavier frenetic passages. Ballsy shouts burst atop flurried blast, before the march takes a more atmospheric and markedly doomier trajectory. The creates a sensory full circle, bringing in both the album’s opening and title track, while also bridging the gap between the likes of
Crystalline Exhaustion and
Demonic Wealth before it. Overall, Krallice is right where Krallice expects they would be, living in the land of doing whatever the hell they want. After all, these albums just seem to pop out of the ground, or space, or the swamps near Mick Barr’s place and fans right now wouldn’t have it any other way.
