A puzzling work – review of “Scour Order” by KRALLICE

I lost most of my first listen to the album cover. Mick Barr drew it, and rather than paying attention to the record it belongs to, I spent that pass tracing his lines with my finger, trying to work out what they were meant to depict.

Krallice release “Scour Order” on 18 September via Profound Lore Records, the label that put out their first three albums. This is their sixteenth full-length, and Barr is one of four: guitar and vocals alongside Colin Marston, with Nicholas McMaster on bass and vocals and Lev Weinstein on drums.

Recent albums had them swapping instruments and wandering into ambient and experimental places. Here Marston and Barr are back on guitars with McMaster on bass, though Marston’s vocals have stayed, so this isn’t a reset so much as a step back towards a shape they already knew.

Then there’s where these songs came from. Roadburn commissioned them, and they were premiered in Tilburg in April. This material was written to be played once, in a room where nobody had heard a note of it, and only afterwards became a record.

“Agonal Shining” opens with everything at once, all four of them, which isn’t what I was expecting. What kept me there was the way the riff moves around the song over and over without stopping, almost as if it were drawing circles and figures. The tempo keeps shifting, and every time the vocals arrive the instruments make room for them.

“Kill the Guardian”, two tracks later, is one of two songs where three of them take vocal verses, which is part of why the record sounds so crowded in the best sense. Marston has said it started with Barr before the band arranged it together, and that their own nickname for it is “porridger”, because it’s soupy and nutritious.

By the time I reached “Unceasing Path” I was lost and overwhelmed, and it took the interlude near the end for me to shake my head and realise there were still more songs coming. The drums never settle and the guitars pound against the tempo rather than with it. “Living Useless Ritual”, at around six minutes, is the one moment where the record lets you see the edges of a song.

What appealed to me in those first tracks got harder to digest the longer I listened, though. Heavy, eclectic riffs stacked against sharp changes of direction are not something I’m used to, and the length of the songs on top of those structures started to feel daunting. I’m not saying it isn’t good. I just found it hard to stay with to the end, and I pushed through rather than being carried. Maybe the cover was the warning all along.

Desptie my difficulty to keep up with the whole album I’d be curious to hear how this works live, given the density never lets up. It already has, of course: these songs stood up in a room in Tilburg before they were ever a record. Krallice will be performing in Eurpoe and UK on their first European tour, closing the run at Damnation Fest in Manchester.

Tracklist

1. Agonal Shining
2. Grievous Corrector
3. Kill the Guardian
4. Unceasing Path
5. Living Useless Ritual
6. Indecipherable Divinities
7. Her Green Arms
8. Scour Order