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Kelly Moran

Feb 10, 2025 By Matthew Berlyant Photography by Matthew Berlyant Web Exclusive

Playing their first Manhattan show in “40,000 years,” by their admission (though that’s obviously an exaggeration), long-running New York-based underground metal institution Krallice wowed the faithful crowd with an hour-plus long set of mostly instrumental, progressive, intense, technical, and atmospheric black metal. Featuring founding members Mick Barr on bass, Colin Marston on keyboards, and Lev Weinstein on drums along with Nicholas McMaster on guitar, their set (as expected) leaned heavily towards their latest material, particularly, 2024’s Inorganic Rites with two of the five songs (“Fatestorm Sanctuary” and “Universal Talisman”) coming from that record while two (the title track and “Frost”) came from 2022’s Crystalline Exhaustion. The finale was the final part of 2023’s four-part opus Porous Resonance Abyss, on record at over twenty-one minutes and similarly epic on this evening (though I surely wasn’t using a stopwatch).

Although most of their compositions are long, they are never ponderous, and thus not a single note is wasted, always holding this writer’s attention throughout. Long instrumental passages often filled with as much beauty as menace are augmented by gruff, black-metal style vocals (by both Marston and Barr), creating a hypnotic, disorienting effect that on paper shouldn’t work, yet does. It’s also notable that eighteen years into being a band, they don’t need to rely on their “classic” era (despite their s/t 2008 album recently being inducted into Decibel Magazine’s Hall of Fame and its influence on U.S. black metal overall) as they keep developing their sound and moving forward, releasing records regularly at a clip that might make anyone but Robert Pollard or John Zorn blush.

Pianist Kelly Moran and fellow long-running metal band Dysryhmia (who have been around even longer than Krallice, specifically since the late nineties, and who also feature Marston) opened the show. While I was really looking forward to seeing Dysrhythmia, I couldn’t get there on time as the show had an early-ish start. Moran, though, more than made up for that by delightfully enchanting the crowd with beautiful, instrumental, piano pieces that, again on paper, seemed like an odd way to prepare the crowd for a loud black-metal band. But, like Krallice’s set, it worked like gangbusters. Bravo.