This philippine one-man band promises to deliver "audio brutality". After large number of releases and twelve years, it's time to the debut album for Kratornas. This functioned as an introductory course to the band for me.

Kratornas have taken extreme styles of brutal metal music and created their own brewage out of them. Black metal, thrash metal and death metal are all alloyed into pretty individual sounding aural hell, which doesn't commiserate a listener a bit. Song structures are varying, there's fast blast parts and insane speed bursts, but also slower, atmosphere oozing parts. Old German thrash metal is surely one of the Kratornas's influences, as well as Norwegian nekro black metal. Guitar solos are old school string raping, ear-bleeding guffawing demonic ones, Slayer's guitar solos sound normal compared to what Kratornas do.

Recorded at home, the album sounds anything but good, meaning the studio produced way. This does sound of "audio brutality" for sure, but while there's good points about it, there's also negative ones. The worst defect is drum machine and how it often gets buried under other noise and leaves a listener to trying to guess what the fuck is this small machine doing. Distant sounding instruments are nothing new in black metal, but this way, it doesn't work well in this kind of blasting thrashy and noisy black metal. It simply sounds too weak in all this brutal noise. However, this fluctuates during the album as it was recorded during four different sessions, being at its worst on two first songs but thankfully gets a bit more poweful afterwards which really lifts the mood of the songs. Other defect about the drum machine is that it's occasionally been programmed a bit badly. But to good points now. Guitar simply rips! Truly thick and disruptive sonus, the most prevalent instrument on the album. Also the guitar sound changes during the album, but not that much, maybe it's more balancing of different elements than guitar tone itself that changes. Vocals are also distant, sometimes sounding like coming from abyssic depths, but they work very well this way. Growls and insane shrieks are at least partly effected, adding inhuman feel to the vocals department. Lyrics are just what to expect: About apocalypse and against Christianity.

Those who seek aural brutality and chaos executed in black thrash style should check Kratornas out. There's something very gripping about this noise. It's contagious like syphilis, but not in a pandemic way, but more like an endemic way, i.e. it should please many black thrash freaks out there.

Rating: 6- (out of 10) ratings explained

Reviewed by Lane
10/03/2007 20:10