Album Review: Kratornas - God of The Tribes
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Kratornas present me with a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, their brand of technical atonality is one with which I generally vibe. On the other, at most times, Kratornas sound like they’re fighting cobras in the studio. Mad lashings of almost random notes and a tempo that flies about like a balloon when you let go of the end. A guitar tone that sounds like a mosquito swarm, and shockingly indulgent song lengths. The whole package winds up being this unwieldy detonation of really angry free jazz in which virtually nothing feels connected to - or even particularly friendly with – anything else. Almost any section of this is interchangeable with any other section and it would present no serious qualitative change, no matter how you twisted or turned it, to totally reorganise the release on a minute-by-minute basis. It’s like a blank rubix cube, no combination or recombination of it promises any meaningful alteration to the whole.
It’s almost to the extent that i’m not altogether sure that there was any point to separating the tracks at all. Imagine a box of lego in which every block was a different atonal riff. Now imagine you shook the living shit out of the box as though there was hatred in your heart; the resulting clutter of unconnected-but-individually-cool sections is more or less what it’s like to listen to Kratornas. Nothing stays still, nothing pauses, nothing flows naturally. The result is hopelessly incoherent. It’s not helped by how long the songs are either; “Cursed Sky Serpent” is fifteen minutes long – which is quite a while for a song that sounds like someone threw a Stratocaster at a guy trying to wrestle carnivorous ferrets out of his underwear. It can’t really be said to crescendo, because songs don’t really evolve so much as jerk spasmodically from one place to another before eventually sort of landing unpredictably at the finish line.
It's not that they aren’t talented, clearly they are. Leads flicker and flame, and some form of devilish genius lurks in anyone who can compose this sort of stuff. I’m also deeply fond of the production, with that marvellously clear bass bursting through like xenomorph offspring. It’s not wholly devoid of enjoyable moments, every now and then amidst the melee they’ll chuck in a few blessed passages that do manage to grip my attention, like the fun percussive work at 5.20 in “Cursed Sky Serpent”. It’s also abundantly clear that both members are attuned to each other, possibly psychically. Everything one does is accentuated and complimented by the other. Endless drum fills reinforce the fidgeting meth hallucination of the guitar work, and vice versa. But that unfortunately hasn’t made it a more compelling work to consume on my end. Between riffs that sound like they forced a tarantula to kickbox a fretboard, an absolute failure to understand when a song should end, and a songwriting approach that prioritises darting, unfocused rambling in total defiance of any concept of logical connection or confluence... it’s not that you can’t have abstract, experimental arrangements, but for me this is far too close to just slapping lots of weird shit into each other like it’s frigging octopus foreplay. And then there’s more specific grumbles I’ve got, like that baffling magical chime effect they use a bunch on here (at the end of Novena Para Guerra for example) that sounds like Aladdin just jumped in through the window.
I think the best song on here is “Evil and Plunder” because it’s the shortest. That’s less uncharitable than it might seem; in bitesize chunks, Kratornas come across more as agents of Chaos, dealers of chained mayhem. Their music, mercurial as it is, has some fangs to it when diced and served appropriately. But in these longer tracks... it just feels skittish, unfocused, ill at ease with itself. It’s enervated and diminished by it’s commitment to tripping all over itself, and I think that’s a huge shame, not least because these guys are clearly skilled, but also because it’s clear that a lot of passion and effort went into this, and whenever i amass the self awareness to quit flipping through the thesaurus for suitably indignant terms with which to pillory it, I just kinda feel like shit for disliking it. So perhaps it would be best to end on a conciliatory note. If, for some reason, you’re reading this Kratornas – I tried. I really did. And I’m sorry. But I could not for the life of me get on board with this one.
