Stones

Although I searched a lot, I found very few information on the internet about Okketaehm which come from the U.S.A. and apart from the demo “Stones” of 2012 that I recently received, the band has released one more demo in 2010. This album contains only one track of eighteen minutes. The band wants to create the atmosphere and to set up the scenery combining harsh, Scandinavian Black Metal with ambient mainly, as also with noise influences.

The album begins with an awesome riff, majestic, epic and at the same time dark and imposing, creating the impression that we deal with a very interesting release. Unfortunately exactly after fifty seconds of repetition of the mentioned above riff, an eight minutes ambient part begins so that they continue with a six minutes Black Metal part after the ninth minute of the track. So you understand that the album is more ambient than Black Metal. Apart from that, in the Black Metal track, there are one or two interesting riffs that they are repeated and become tedious, while the structure of the truck makes it completely monotonous and boring. Concerning the ambient part of the album, I can’t judge if it is good for the genre as I don’t like ambient and my knowledge and experience concerning that is very limited.

The guitars are distorted and raw, they don’t have any mistakes but also they don’t have anything special. The bass can’t be heard almost at all, while the drums are those trying to save somehow the album with some interesting lines. The vocals are raw Black Metal vocals, quite expressive and interesting. The production is very dirty, as an approach is correct as it absolutely fits to the bands style but its materialization isn’t good as noise is created which makes the listen more difficult. The mix has maintained the characteristics of a rehearsal, something that fits to the sound, with the only mistake to be the bass’ abcence. The lyrics are written in English but they are not contained in the promo that i received.

Generally the ambient elements Black Metal isn’t something that i like, i just tolerate them, when the album is good. In the case of Okketaehm, the ambient outreaches the permitted borders of that kind of elements inside a composition and it becomes the composition itself. On the other hand, the Black Metal parts are monotonous and boring. So ”Stones” belongs in the category of those albums that he who listened to it, will never ασχοληθεί with the band again. As you understand by everything mentioned above, don’t even bother listen to this one.