Krohm - The Haunting Presence

Rating: 8.7

Country: USA

Release Date: 2007

Track list:
1.   Black Shores   07:23
2.   Lifeless Serenade   09:35
3.   I Respiri Delle Ombre   07:13
4.   Relic   07:44
5.   Memories Of The Flesh   08:15
6.   Tra La Carne E Il Nulla   07:06
7.   Syndrome   09:07

Total playing time   56:29

Band Website: Krohm

Krohm - The Haunting Presence

Numinas (Dario Derna) - Guitars, Vocals, Drums

Is this really the same Krohm that wrote the tedious A World Through Dead Eyes? The more I hear this, the more I begin to suspect aliens replaced the guy who wrote that album with one of their own as a joke. Anyway, for those unfamiliar, Krohm is one of those mournful one-man American black metal acts that really like Burzum, Shining, Silencer, and the like. While Krohm's last outing was pretty much the most archetypical, nondescript instance of that description capable of being conceived by the human mind, the music here takes cues from modern European (particularly French) black metal (lines can be drawn to Celestia and current crop of "shoegaze" black metal pop hybrids, for example. Also, French things apparently go in parentheses now.) and the darker edges of ambient and post-rock circles. At any rate, aside from the gently blooping ambient touches opening and closing the final song "Syndrome," the vastness of Krohm's sonic palette has strayed far from your usual Filosofem-pilfering.

These seven tracks can basically be lumped into two groups: first, songs that display a lurid pop sensibility, rife with arpeggiated counterpoints, like some sort of psychedelic Moonlight Sonata run through a filter of buzzing black metal; and second, more funereal dirges coming closer to the Krohm of old. The latter category tends to maintain the least appeal over a series of listens, but Numinas always manages to establish a level of involvement with the listener with lush texture and occasionally chopper-like rhythmic prowess. Though, that's admittedly a rather polarizing dissection; at the end of the day, all of the songs bleed together into a coherent whole of forlorn, transcendental black metal best experienced in marathon.

Numinas' rasp is fairly, er, raspy. It's nothing special, only gaining any sort of emotional intensity in the final couple of songs with no notable vocal patterns of which to speak, but at least it's not drowning in effects beyond recognition like some of Krohm's American compatriots, who shall remain nameless. By which I mean Xasthur and Leviathan.

In a decision that I'm sure will alienate some so-called "kvlt" black metallers (I realize the term "so-called" is superfluous when paired with quotation marks, but I want to distance myself from that stupid fucking word. PS: France), The Haunting Presence is the most clean, accessible recording Krohm has yet produced. Clean guitar breaks! Aching fugues! Actual hooks! All of my sentences end with exclamation marks! Some of these songs almost sound like the result of an infectious pop song's notes as seen and reinterpreted through a smudged lens.

The signature ethereal polish of Necromorbus Studio renders The Haunting Presence a deceptively layered affair, with shifting walls of ambience that emerge from the dense miasma of psychedelic blackness and envelop you before you even realize they're there. Everything sounds impeccably organic, so even contrivances like what sounds like distorted sax (or some sort of pseudo-saxophone keyboard patch?) lines slithering in and out of the backdrop of the gorgeous "Tra La Carne E Il Nulla" feel natural. The softness of elements arrests you from construing more than a vague, spectral notion of what you're hearing, but this lack of purity makes The Haunting Presence all the more sublime.

I once described Krohm as "Leviathan except not as good"; now I'm afraid it's the other way around. Among all the USBM outfits, I never would have expected that Krohm would be the luminary to prove American "suicidal" black metal can be more than Burzum for kids. A++++++++ WOULD KILL SELF AGAIN.

April 3rd, 2008