{"id":480752,"date":"2019-01-11T06:41:45","date_gmt":"2019-01-11T13:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=777567"},"modified":"2019-01-11T06:41:45","modified_gmt":"2019-01-11T13:41:45","slug":"song-you-need-to-know-krallice-wolf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/music-news\/song-you-need-to-know-krallice-wolf\/","title":{"rendered":"Song You Need to Know: Krallice, \u2018Wolf\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Think of Krallice as the underground-metal equivalent of a gourmet food truck. Much as that set-up allows a chef to make their own hours and cook pretty much whatever they want, this Queens, New York, band\u2019s M.O. affords them an unusual degree of logistical and creative freedom. They tour infrequently, record all their material in-house at guitarist Colin Marston\u2019s Menegroth studio and release music direct to Bandcamp with little fanfare, at whatever rate feels comfortable to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

If their methods are humble, the end product is anything but. Krallice\u2019s output \u2014 like Wolf<\/em>, a new 15-minute EP marked by daunting musical density and a diverse range of extreme-metal approaches \u2014 is some of the more challenging and surprising in the contemporary scene, a fact that\u2019s reflected in their passionate cult fan base. The more they do exactly as they please, the more their renown seems to grow.<\/span><\/p>\n

A new Krallice release doubles as a reminder of how tough, and probably pointless, it is to try to categorize the band. Their Bandcamp page contains the self-description \u201cblack metal or not.\u201d It\u2019s a terse statement but a telling one. Metal remains taxonomy-obsessed, with acts being slotted into ever-tinier niches, from \u201ctech-death\u201d to \u201cblackgaze,\u201d but the best bands don\u2019t seem to pay the slightest attention to genre (or subgenre) signifiers. Since their inception, Krallice have morphed again and again, drawing initial inspiration from Nineties black metal but gradually growing proggier and more imposingly technical, as heard on 2015\u2019s excellent Ygg huur<\/a><\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was clear from the start that a band including guitarists Marston and Mick Barr (full disclosure: I\u2019m friendly with both and have worked with Marston on recordings by my own bands) was never going to sound typical, as these musicians\u2019 respective r\u00e9sum\u00e9s are dotted with deeply eccentric projects like Behold\u2026 the Arctopus<\/a> and Orthrelm<\/a>. But by the time of twin 2017 albums Lo\u00fcm<\/em><\/a> and Go Be Forgotten<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 the first a thorny collaboration with Neurosis member Dave Edwardson and the second a blend of transporting art-metal epics and meditative synths that earned a mention<\/a> on Rolling Stone<\/em>\u2018s year-end metal round-up \u2014 Krallice had established themselves as a band for whom nothing was out of bounds.<\/span><\/p>\n

The title track of Wolf<\/em> is yet another curveball. It starts out as an agonized downtempo churn, easily one of Krallice\u2019s most spacious musical moments to date, complete with sonically warped vocals from bassist Nick McMaster and a more stretched-out version of Marston and Barr\u2019s trademark trilling riffage. But around the 2:30 mark, the feel changes drastically, as drummer Lev Weinstein leads the band first into a head-nodding midtempo charge and then an ethereal blast-beat section. The song gradually ramps up from there, climaxing in a math-metal workout worthy of Seventies Rush. It\u2019s a head-spinning listen that compels multiple passes to parse out exactly what\u2019s going on.<\/span><\/p>\n

More feverish weirdness awaits on the rest of the EP \u2014 buckle up for closing track \u201cTime Rendered Omni,\u201d which scrambles an album\u2019s worth of musical ideas into a frantic 146 seconds. As a whole, Wolf<\/em> is another forward-looking dispatch from a low-profile band that\u2019s gradually becoming a DIY institution.<\/span><\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Think of Krallice as the underground-metal equivalent of a gourmet food truck. Much as that set-up allows a chef to make their own hours and cook pretty much whatever they want, this Queens, New York, band\u2019s M.O. affords them an unusual degree of logistical and creative freedom. They tour infrequently, record all their material in-house […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-480752","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-12 11:52:07","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KQZR - The Reel","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}