Kratherion - Mantra Lucifer Flagelantes (2013)

   Kratherion is officially sorted to black metal bands, but their music includes as many black metal features as most American bands have in general. And that's not too many. To be more specific, their music is closer to war metal than to ordinary black metal.
    There are definitely themes that came from black metal, but they're not so determining. But instead, the majority of themes, the sound and the main impression are more reminding to death metal. The extremely aggressive and radical tone combined with the mentioned mixed influences are quite war metal-like. The only thing that keeps their music balancing on the edge of styles is that both the massive death metal themes and the blackened influences having their own parts of focus. This switching preference is basically advantageous, cause it's making the album diverse, but the same time it doesn't let it to be unified enough. With other words, Kratherion's music is too diverse to become war metal, since the style demands to be more monotonous. "Mantra Lucifer Flagelantes" definitely have the required insane insanity and radical concept for slipping forward into the closest related style, but this half way gave them more possibilities for a wider range of self-expression. And they quite lived with the chance, the album has plenty of theme and speed switches that are highlighting better the band's compromise-less intention, and in the long run, making their music more enjoyable. Interestingly the mixed style pick also could be looked at as an old school and as a modern tendency the same time. For instance naming bands from their local scene like Atomic Aggressor as mainly influential would sound the same reasonable like naming a war metal band like Morbosidad.