Khost

GOVERNANCE

If Black Sabbath articulated a generation’s disillusionment, raised amid inner city industrial decline, then fellow Brummies Khost have just written the eulogy for the present day generation’s loss of purpose. This third album quickly establishes an aura of cult-like spiritual reverence, a disembodied vapour of chants, wails and electrified aberrations drifting between an unrelenting machine press of lo-fi guitar fuzz and pounding percussion. It subdues the mind on Subliminal Chloroform, then reinvigorates it with spite on Cloudbank Mausoleum, as Oxbow’s Eugene Robinson delivers an impassive spokenword piece amidst subconscious rage incarnate, the album’s first recognisable riff standing out amid the clamour four tracks in. Such moments of arresting musicality, as with Defraction’s sorrowful strings, are as fragile and beautiful a companion as a solitary flower found within an ashen wasteland. Governance deconstructs doom down to its base elements over 50 minutes, its hazardously industrial environs an exhausting maze of rubble that truly tests the stamina.