Khôrada – Salt (Review)

This is the debut album from Khôrada, a progressive/doom/post-metal band from the US.

Featuring most of the members of the much-missed Agalloch coupled with the singer of Giant Squid, this album contains 55 minutes of contemplative, intelligently-composed music.

Now here’s an album with real emotive power. The music can be loosely termed as progressive post-metal, but there’s a multitude of different styles skilfully incorporated into this release.

With resplendent melody, delicate energy, and a beautiful delivery, Salt is an unexpected album that’s completely captivating in its presentation and effectiveness. Everything here seems designed to instantly strike a chord with the listener, while simultaneously offering up cavernous depths that can be explored only on subsequent listens as the layers of the music become peeled back further and further.

Combining many different styles, paces, dynamics, and creative feelings into songs that are curiously both fragile and strong, Khôrada’s music is hard to define, but easy to enjoy. Black metal, post-metal, progressive rock, folk, doom, and many more diverse elements can be heard across the album’s playing time, all deftly woven into the fabric of what makes this album so individual and special.

Salt is richly textured and has the type of multifaceted songwriting that keeps you returning for more and more and more. The album is a complex collection of tracks that hides some of its complexity behind layers of nuance and subtlety, effectively striking a balance that manages to achieve both instant appeal and repeat-play longevity and substance.

This is an expansive and atmospheric piece of work, but that doesn’t mean it never takes a direct approach or that it’s without a certain level of aggression. These latter aspects are channelled and delivered in non-standard ways, however. You can hear a blackened influence across this album, for example, even if it’s a much more shaded and colourful version of black metal than what most bands are capable of producing.

In many ways Khôrada have as unique a sound as it’s possible to have in 2018. The closest I can think to describe this would be if you mix together aspects of someone like Enslaved with someone like Crippled Black Phoenix, alongside elements of bands like Pelican, Grave Pleasures, and Autumnblaze. You can also hear a bit of Agalloch here and there too, of course. None of this really does justice to what Salt sounds like though, not really. I strongly suggest you just listen to it and get washed away in its tidal embrace.

Very emotive, very affecting, very atmospheric, and wonderfully-written. Khôrada have produced a special work here.