Double Review: Kraanerg – Aria for Labellum Tongues
Style: Avant-prog, brutal prog, art punk, avant-garde metal (Clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: black midi, John Zorn, Sigh, NoMeansNo
Country: United States
Release date: 4 September 2026
Today, in a special double review, Dave and Clay tackle the latest releast from avant-garde metallers Kraanerg. Our writers come from very different perspectives and offer some insight into how people interpret and approach experimental music. Stop by the avant-garden for a bit, smell the flowers, and enjoy!
Review by: Dave
The systematic exclusion of queer people from places of privilege should come as no surprise to anyone who’s actually talked with a queer person for more than five minutes. This, historically, extends to music as well: it took until the late 1990s, for example, for Rob Halford of Judas Priest to come out as gay, decades after the group’s emergence. As a consequence, queer people have had to make their own spaces in music, whether it be the dazzling, eclectic hyperprog of present day, the elegant and culturally critical ball culture of the late 80s, or queercore, a beacon of resistance in punk rock. Multi-instrumentalist and composer Nat Bergrin of Kraanerg is no stranger to the latter, holding a presence in the DIY scene while coming up as a classically trained pianist enamored with Romantic-era compositions. Kraanerg’s latest record, Aria for Labellum Tongues, is a love letter to both classical and punk, making flowery friends out of unlikely garden bed fellows.
Aria for Labellum Tongues tangibly evokes the tension between the queer DIY punk community, modern Romantic composition, and the oblique, jazzy tonal language championed by groups like Kayo Dot. Musically, a slew of piano, saxophone, and vibraphone intertwine with aggressive, kinetic drumwork and brittle guitars across extensive, evolving song structures; lyrically, humans metamorphose into orchids and moss while capitalist barons respond by stripping the land of its last life. Across Aria for Labellum Tongues, nature and humans are entangled in a lockstep struggle for the right to Texas’ post oak savannahs and blackland prairies.
Few moments across Aria offer true reprieve; in fact, most of the record sits in an unsettling exploration of the sublime through its otherworldly tonal vocabulary. The uneasy tone is set with the dissonant descending guitar of opener “Amargosa Raga”, which is then accompanied by punctuated drums, ultra-bright piano chords, and tantalizingly menacing saxophone. An undeniable excitement courses throughout the track, as if the listener is being pulled through a wormhole to a thundering and cinematic conclusion where double-kick drums open up the sonic space to wailing vocal melodies and despondent violins. Follow-up track “Aria for Labellum Tongues” is even more oppressive, suffocating the listener under repeated arpeggios and claustrophobic beats, reaching an unknowable, brain-scrambling grandeur through swirling violin melodies. The contemplative midsection of “Blessings of Silk, Saffron, and Naran-ji” and the brittle, dirging buildup of “Visible to the Wrong Faces” show Kraanerg at their most tranquil with delicate, hypnotic piano and spacey, plucky guitar chords; however, Aria never fully lets up its eldritch melodic affect, save for the exhilarating and outright catchy “Iron Sign of the Masdevallia”.
Bergrin’s clean vocals—a new addition to Kraanerg’s sonic toolbox1—don’t come out swinging as ardently as the surrounding instrumentation. The vocal melodies themselves are often engaging, particularly the idiosyncratic lines that introduce “Silk, Saffron, and Naran-Ji”, but Bergrin’s performance feels at times fledgling. Bergrin’s vocals do best around twisting, unstable melodics and punctuated shouts—on the flip side, the long, drawn-out performance on “Visible to the Wrong Faces” is brought too close to the forefront and muddies a track which is already a bit lacking in terms of compositional footholds2. Fundamentally, the vocals do a great job of contributing to the artistic tension at the core of Aria, highlighting the almost combative nature of punk’s rough edges and indomitable personality against the adventurous experimentation of modern classical. Unfortunately, when the vocals are placed inappropriately in the mix, they end up frustrating more than enlightening.
Aria for Labellum Tongues blossoms with eclecticism, imposing the union of musical communities that have been systematically kept separate from each other for their respective histories. Nonetheless, Bergrin demands a seat at the Romanticism table through their clever invocation of the sublime in terrifying, cinematic soundscapes, all while retaining a DIY punk ethos to inject its compositions with a raw conviction. While Aria as a whole is conceptually complete, the vocal performance sometimes leaves something to be desired and its mammoth closer lacks the focus to appropriately conclude the record. Nonetheless, I can’t help but be drawn to Aria for Labellum Tongues’ for its grandeur, tantalizingly evasive point-of-view, and wholly unique vision.
Dave’s final verdict: 7/10
Review by: Clay
As a fan and reviewer of extreme progressive music, I have developed quite an iron stomach for tolerating, and often reveling in, the sonically abrasive and hostile. The key to expanding one’s musical palate is a willingness to embrace the uncomfortable and to take up temporary residence beyond the boundaries of your comfort zone. While adventures into uncharted auditory territories are fruitless expeditions more often than not, the chance of discovering an unheralded treasure of an album is the dragon that I continuously chase. So take a stab at the avant-garde outfit Kraanerg’s sophomore album Aria for Labellum Tongues? Sure, what the hell; after all, fear is for the weak.
What Nat Bergrin, who is responsible for the vocals, clean guitar, and piano in addition to the composition and arrangements, has accomplished on Aria for Labellum Tongues is nothing short of dark musical sorcery. Never before have I experienced an album that resulted in such a strong visceral reaction that it left me feeling physically ill from listening. The Kraanerg-induced wave of nausea is partly brought on by Bergrin’s simply awful vocal performance. Their clean twang, like a satire of the theatrically sinister voice of Avatar‘s Jonannes Eckerstrӧm, openly mocks the listener for daring to try and sit through Aria for Labellum Tongues. Bergrin’s half-assed delivery sounds like they took a speed-run through recording the album’s vocals in one take—unconcerned with how off-key and cringeful the execution was. His flat and strained moanings in “Amargosa Raga” and “Blessings in Silk, Saffron, and Naran-Ji” are odious and down-right excruciating to sit through. As the album concludes with Bergrin repeating the phrase “I want you dead”, I believed him. Why else would they put their listeners through such a horrific experience?
But Bergrin’s atrocious vocals are only half of what makes Aria for Labellum Tongues so nausea-inducing. The instrumentation sounds like a group of drunk musicians playing on out-of-tune, dusty instruments that have been left out for weeks. Apparently unable to detect the discordant tunings across the instruments, each band member gets lost in their inebriated execution. Maximilian Jacobs’ violin screeches like nails on a chalkboard in “Aria for Labellum Tongues” and “Blessings in Silk, Saffron, and Naran-Ji” while the random appearances of the vibraphone, alto and soprano saxophones, and distorted guitar come and go without any apparent rhyme or reason. The opening crooked-sounding guitar twang and piano clankering that opens the album in “Amargosa Raga” begins the quick descent into the queasy collective performance that rarely lets up. There are brief periods of reprieve from the stomach-churning cacophony of off-kilter sounds, including the piano-led avant-garde jazz fusion interlude of “Anguloa Virginalis (Um Rosto de Mulher)”, though these are few and far between. Jason Roe’s delivery behind the drumkit provides the sole consistently palatable instrumental performance in Aria for Labellum Tongues.
Perhaps this noxious, off-tuned avant-garde experiment could have been interesting in a concise package, though at its hour-long length is downright intolerable. As the final two tracks, (“Iron Sign of the Masdevallia” and “Visible to the Wrong Faces”) approach, the end seems near—though joke’s on you: there are still over thirty five-minutes to get through! These excessively lengthy closing songs contain prolonged aimless piano and horn-filled passages that meander without any clear destination or conclusion. Once Aria for Labellum Tongues reaches its painfully belated conclusion, the Kraanerg-induced nausea is so overwhelming, you’ll likely find yourself sprawled out on the bathroom floor for a while until the sensation gradually abates.
Aria for Labellum Tongues is inaccessible for the sake of inaccessibility with very few redeemable qualities warranting a return listen. Hell, I commend anyone who is able to sit through the full album in one sitting. Kraanerg dish out both the most unlistenable vocal performance that I have come across this year alongside an unsettlingly disjointed instrumentation that in combination left me feeling actually ill. Feeling brave? Grab some zofran and a barf bag, you’re gonna need it.
Clay’s final verdict: 2/10
Recommended tracks: Amargosa Raga, Iron Sign of the Masdevallia, Blessings of Silk, Saffron, and Naran-Ji
You may also like: A Forest of Stars, Kayo Dot (Hubardo, Stained Glass), Papangu, Book of Sands
Related links: Bandcamp
Label: Independent
Kraanerg is:
– Nat Bergrin: composition, piano, guitars, vocals
– Jason Roe: drums, vibraphone
– D.L.: guitars
– Markov Soroka: keyboards
– Maximilian Jacobs: violin
– Jack Dell: saxophone
– Sydney Smith: saxophone
With guests:
– Dom Grande: saxophone, track 5
– Jules Liebenthal: guitars, track 6
– Russell Rode: viola, track 6
- Veins Preserved in Coiled Wire and Heart of a Cherry Pit Sun technically feature vocal performances, but they are not as prominent nor as central to the music as on Aria for Labellum Tongues. The Harbinger EP features harsh vocals. ↩︎
- At least in its middle third; the finale of this track in particular is quite expansive and a satisfying end to Aria. ↩︎
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