Excavation album cover
Excavation

The Haxan Cloak

2013
Tri Angle

This is it, gang. 2013. Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak) found the spookiest fold between the organic and the digital. Hans Zimmer, Dennis Villeneuve and a clutch of other less talented film workers stole the sub bass drop and overall mechanical digestion vibe of this monsterpiece. I’ve never figured out, beyond a few violin passages, what Krlic used to make this record, although it’s probably something mundane like a synthesizer and a bunch of software. What it feels like, after dozens of listens, is a band of machine-mammal hybrids who have become sentient in a dungeon and are slowly dragging themselves towards the light. That is what most of it is, and then there’s “The Drop.” If you ask me—and you sort of are!—the two songs that represent the peak for electronic music in the teens were “Andro,” by Oneohtrix Point Never and “The Drop.” After an album’s worth of clanking and slithering and growling, Krlic brings traditional musical order into the mix. We keep all the terror, but we get a bassline and a melody, and the result is devastating. It’s a slow tribute to a sinking icebreaker sung by the sandworms and arranged by the ghost of Robert Smith. “The Drop” plays itself out as a pop single for four minutes. Then, after a short break, it becomes a ritual for the terrordome as violin moans and the drums of doom (they are likely digital but they sound like they have a diameter of ten or twelve feet stretched with the skin of an ox) mark the tempo for a Final Dance of the Interred, pounding itself into a hail of sour dust.

Sasha Frere-Jones

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