Review Summary: Your dad likes this. I like this.
Menegroth the Thousand Caves must reek of musky, humid air devoid of deodorant or summer breeze. No really, it’s like Mick Barr and Colin Marston must never leave their studio save for a romantic walk down to the swamp to record vocals in a car while a fog haze lifts from the ground. Since
Mass Cathexis was released at the start of the new decade, we’ve already had four additional albums, paving the way for Marston and co. to continue a virtuous stranglehold on Krallice’s style becoming ever so loosely attached to the black metal scene. I say ‘loosely’, because
Porous Resonance Abyss is less the
Demonic Wealth where newer fans embraced a wholly black metal aesthetic and is instead a transformative synth-led retrospective landscape, naturally stepping off the platform that
Crystalline Exhaustion and
Psychagogue rest their laurels.
Porous Resonance Abyss is downright spacey, departing the more salubrious avant black metal which has served Krallice so well over the years and replacing it with progressive artsy dad rock. To wit, these ol’ dogs have some class about them.
Or maybe it’s the fact that
Porous Resonance Abyss is entirely instrumental, devoid of the usual snarls usually associated with blast beats, riffs and other black metal stereotypes. Perhaps that is
class. It’s as if Krallice finds themselves in a class of its own, or at least in line with something Blood Incantation would do to the death metal scene. More likely this is simply the trajectory to where old-dudes-playing-metal are taking their music; veteran’s shifting focus towards something more mellow, laid-back while maintaining
sheer unadulterated enjoyment...or something thereabouts. Either way, Krallice aren’t known for simply conforming to a sound, and are at least willing to explore a cosmos, swamp or brick-building to achieve whatever whimsy they’re chasing. As to what
Porous Resonance Abyss actually sounds like however, is better kept to broad expansions within time and space. Climes like “Part One” set
mood, atmosphere broken with the pitter-patter of double bass, atonal snare and the crashing of cymbals. “Part Two” is realistically more “metal” but it’s drenched in a vintage synth setting born in the eighties before ebbing tones introduce the record’s latter half.
The real power play here however, comes in the form of a twenty-one minute blockbuster as an epic footnote placed precariously at the end of more bite sized samples through the cosmos (or
abyss if you will). Krallice’s musical breadth takes the progressive nuance of a band well-versed in
just about everything that they do and stretches it far beyond the conventional expectations of where and when to blast, riff to infinity (and beyond) while securing the listener to a rollercoaster of cinematic ups and downs. That said, there is still room here (and elsewhere) for Krallice to incorporate more of their
style into an album as broad and reaching as this instrumental slab of progressive not-black metal. There is an aesthetic here that begs the question: Screams? All the while pushing back on the fleeting need to be the next
Sunbather type turning point in today’s benevolent metal scene. Hopefully that’s Krallice’s larger point, filling us all with “what-if” moments while we gaze up into an abyss that’s so full and empty at the same time. Maybe this is exactly why an aging metal community isn’t just willing to accept a more explorative—yet laid back Krallice. We’re embracing it. Resonate with the simple fact that metal and Krallice don’t and shouldn’t set themselves firmly to one ideal, but to search for something…anything beyond a basic scope. It’s the dad in me, and the dad in you but Krallice are aging oh so gracefully with
Porous Resonance Abyss.
