Largely recognized as their breakthrough album, Khanate was confident
enough by the two-song, forty-minute Capture & Release (2005) to peel back it's
layers of thick mossy droneand reveal the minimalist underpinnings, a change
either interpreted as maturity or an implied threat. "It's a grim, avant-garde
exercise in tension and paranoia. Dense, leaden drones fill up the spaces between
O'Malley's sparse, deeply sustained guitar chords.
Vocalist Alan Dubin's anguished vocals seem to convey the tortures of the
damned as if there were not a shred of hope left for existence in this world.
Capture & Release is not dissimilar to black metal in how it so violently conveys
such a bleak and ultra-nihilistic world outlook. But while the standard tempo
on a black metal album typically strays into the triple digits in terms of beats per
minute, Khanate's plodding pace keeps the BPM soundly within the singledigit range." (Tiny Mix Tapes).
