Khanate - Clean Hands Go Foul

Once Khanate’s name is mentioned, you cannot help yourself from thinking about harshness, heaviness and pure rawness. These are one of the main keys that made Khanate what it is without any argument. With the latest and last record Clean Hands Go Foul those above factors are put into question and under serious introspection. Even though rawness and heaviness are undoubtedly present, it is remarkably obvious that there is something missing.

When each instrument’s sound is to be taken separately and analyzed, one could say they are fairly recorded and produced.
Actually, everything seems to be kept as live sounding and as raw as possible with an almost non-existing final production or sound mastering. Sure this sounds great so far thinking it will make your ears bleed, but that’s not the case here at all as all knobs are turned down. They are so low to the point where the entire album suffers from a strictly conservative production unfitting for a record that is supposed to make you brain damaged.

If sound production’s possibilities that could apply to Clean Hands Go Foul are to be considered in the broadest sense, any of them could have turned this record into a mutant beast instead of a dormant one.

Bass could have been so much heavier and higher in the mix. The rock drum sound, which sometimes is mistaken for some random rattle, could have been, at the very least, a three ton hammer crushing solid metal beneath its throbbing power. And, to make things even worse, the guitar sound is extremely thin as if it was plugged through a standard distortion pedal to a small valve state Marshall Amplifier and captured by a direct line in with all its occasional background static electric noises. This instrument, all alone, could have built massive walls of distortion and mayhem that might have added much more depth to the overall sound and gave things an extra boost of chaos and doom.

Although Clean Hands Go Foul is fairly mixed, its sound production value is average at best, which is a shocking surprise for a record handled by James Plotkin. Not a monster of sound waves, but a tamed animal locked in a cage waiting to be fed.