Beats and yelling: Khost

Many Things Afflict Us, Few Things Console Us
Out 20^th September on Cold Spring Records

Khost have the unfortunate burden of being a metal adjacent industrial outfit from Birmingham, meaning their output will forever be benchmarked against Godflesh. Whilst there are similarities, Khost go far beyond Broadrick (at least in the guise of Godflesh) in pushing elements of drone, electronica, and dark ambient to the fore. Broadrick, for all his willingness to nomadically veer around genres under various projects and monikers, has always been claimed by the metal scene as one of their own. Khost, free of this reputational burden, are more obviously a product of the eclectic post punk, industrial, and noise family tree. A fact that makes their output at once less formulaic but more needful of a purpose.

Industrial’s remit, whether it be the pounding body beats of early Killing Joke, the cavernous nihilism of early Swans, or the musique concrete of Test Department, has at its core always functioned as a way to metabolise the uniquely degrading experience of living and working in the urban sprawls of post industrial societies. It’s no coincidence that it came to the fore as the West abandoned its manufacturing base, emptying a surplus population back into a built environment that suddenly had nothing to offer them culturally or economically.

Khost are just the last in a long line of deviations in this story. Their meshing of harsh drone with vestiges of groove driven industrial beats greets the listener as something of a last gasp in this history. The contestation of the built environment since de-industrialisation concluded with the resounding defeat of the populace, later generations of which ostensibly abandoned the physical world entirely for the sake of online battlegrounds. But material reality remains, the uncanny husks of long abandoned warehouses, factories repurposed as startup offices, replete with eerie vestiges of forgetting. Khost give unique expression to this wilderness of the real, the sparsity, inactivity, and stasis apparently a permanent feature of post-industrial England.

Their latest effort, the rather verbosely named ‘Many Things Afflict Us, Few Things Console Us’ breaks with this stasis, seeking to project the appearance of life and variety onto a physical world increasingly bereft of such things. The album is the result of a number of collaborations and allegedly inspired by the experiences of playing live and creating experiments from soundchecks.

The result is a series of loose, informal vignettes stretching from minimal electronica, hardcore punk, noise rock, industrial, sludge metal, and ambient. The overall impression is closer to a nightmarish cousin of The Desert Sessions than anything with an overarching purpose or intentionality. Creation by suggestion and experiment, gambling that meaning will somehow be imparted. The numerous tracks are on the whole relatively short, and seemingly ordered in such a sequence that guarantees the most violent contrasts possible, resulting in a disruptive, disjointed flow. The casual approach, and the sheer variety of half formed ideas, prototypes, and dropped potentials makes for a discomforting experience. As impatient, anomic, and leaderless as the populations dotting the physical environments this music homages.