EHP 0.27: Otesanek debut CD [ purchase cd ] Pressing Information: 1,000 CDs Right from the exquisite feedback and hellish vocal introduction, you know something doesn't feel quite right. Like oil is being pumped into your veins... and you know there is still a long, long way to go before its over. This is the debut of OTESANEK. The band that will decay all senses until nothing is left of you but a pile of bones. These Philadelphians baptize the world with two tracks of gluttonous, overruling doom played slower then the second coming of Jesus Christ. Scattered guitar chords are struck with the force of colliding planets, all while the drums are being beaten rather than played. The duel vocals ring in like the shouts of tortured souls, bellowing from the darkest places anyone could imagine. If you hate EARTH, BORIS, KHANATE, and SUNN O))), then you will despise OTESANEK. Two tracks, thirty minutes. Ex members of PURITAN & HASSAN I SABBAH. TRACK LISTING: 1. Oceans 2. Dead In The Park REVIEWS: Paper Thin Walls (Bryan Camphire) Dead In The Park starts as you realize you’ve been strung-up. The Chthonian torturers approach. A death knell is rung. Abominable suffering ejaculates from their throats. They are not telling a story so much as communing or invoking the infernal; because it’s inhuman, this excess. Everything that’s been said cannot be caught, only fragments. Every physical form has a resonant frequency and can be shattered to bits with sound like a wine glass. These are uncontrolled substances that you did not choose to take. They’ve been slipped to you while you weren't paying attention. It takes about 19 and a half minutes to happen. Your mouth and other orifices have been sealed for a time, movement is no longer willful, you can only twitch and flinch. The music isn't someone's interpretation of a heroin bender. It’s irreparable damage. Blood falls by the bucketfuls onto the ground. With serrated edges the guitars lacerate back and forth boring deeper. You blink seeking respite as the oxygen is cut off from your brain. The drums mimic the sound of the most violent coughing fit you’ve ever had, mocking you, as if to say, "Not yet. But don't worry. You'll get the chance to shit yourself after you’re dead. Everybody does." Enough Fanzine (Jan) Nowadays there are a lot of bands around wildering in the genre of heavy/ doom stuff. Some of them are more based on an clean and mellow approach, others are on the sick and dirty side of things. Otesanek (named after the film by Czechoslovakian animator/filmmaker Jan Svankmajer?) are among the latter. Sloooooow as a mighty snail steamrolling whole cities, the two songs “Oceans” and “Dead In The Park” are making you forget about time and space. Otesanek are not about music, they´re about feeling. Music that can be felt in every inch of your body. Shaking you, causing you to vibrate, turning you inside out. Outstanding are the vocals of Otesanek. I´m not sure if this six piece has to singers, but the two voice that can be heard, complement each other perfectly. One is very low frequency, laying the basic for the other one, which is more aggressive. Really great! If you dig Khanate and Corrupted, here´s one of your new favourites! Indiana Journal Review (Wade Coggeshall) You know how most heavy music attacks you by being played at the fastest speeds humans (and sometimes machines) can muster? Otesanek's debut is the opposite of that. These Philadelphia-based death-sludge merchants unleash a protracted assault on the senses. At just two songs clocking in at almost 30 minutes, you can imagine how deliberately rigorous Otesanek make themselves heard on their self-titled debut. Guitars bleed and creak like a body being drug through an old house, and slam with all the subtlety of a vault door on your fingers. Meanwhile, soul-squeezing growls from the bowels are in full hell mode here. Like the expected unsettling experience of any great horror movie, you half expect Otesanek to abruptly lunge forward with audacious clarity. But aside from movements of harsh soundscapes and underworldly malaise, this miasmal sextet keeps the focus on maintaining an agonizingly slow and menacing crawl. Between the closet-monster vocal croaks and calls and the shattered thunder unpredictably raining down from the strings and drums, Otesanek take doom metal to its logical endpoint. Collective online zine (Alex Deller) The cover of this cd depicts two rams with their spiraling horns interlocked, a perfect metaphor for the music within: a tireless, bludgeoning collision that jars bones and knocks combatants senseless. Having cut away the vestigial traces of Sabbath and the occasional bursts of powerviolence that interspersed their demo, Otesanek now populate that gloomy sanctum inhabited by the likes of Khanate and Corrupted, a place of mountainous sounds that rise and fall like the lifecycles of continents, narrated by voices that hollow themselves out in a series of roars, gasps and choking noises. Rather than any comprehendible structure, the music has a weary, faltering quality that seems to go nowhere at all while making absolute murder of the journey. You can almost visualize some poor sap stumbling blindly through a labyrinth, pausing unexpectedly for breath, slumping despairingly to the ground and backtracking to numerous forked paths with flagging steps, hopelessly lost and ultimately doomed to some terrible, lonely fate. At times the music grinds to such an abrupt halt that you might be fooled into thinking they’d given up the ghost entirely, only for another exhausted chord, groan or drumbeat to be wrenched from some browbeaten player, setting the terrible thing back in motion once again and slamming the door shut on any hopes for a moments’ peace. These two songs may last for just half an hour, but don’t let this lead you to suspect this is some kind of cakewalk. It isn’t. What Otesanek have done is construct a murderous test of endurance that will leave you mangled, worthless and wishing you’d never been born. Metal Review dot com (Erik Thomas) This is one of those few albums that are so hard to put into words, it’s hardly worth trying. It just has to be experienced and literally felt. Featuring ex members of the criminally short lived and brilliant Hassan I Sabbah, Otesanek couldn’t be any further from the Hassan I Sabbah’s chaos core. For fans of droning doom-noise like SunnO))), Buried at Seas and Khanate, Otesanek is a perfect addition to your collection as this 2 song, 30 minute offering is a grating, gravitational force that compels worlds to collide and galaxies to implode. Slow and crawling are adjectives that don’t even come close to describing Otesanek’s oppressive, throat squeezing sound that lies on your chest with the perpetual weight of Sisyphus’ boulder. I’ll admit, I’m not a huge fan of the likes of Khanate and SunO))), but Otesanek add two layers of vocal agony to their sound, that makes them more appealing than just feedback laden noise; an agony filled Mindrot - like scream and an uber deep subterranean growl that each laces the rending notes with both pain and sheer, gargantuan oppression. The expansive, stark notes are rendered with appropriate levels of feedback, but also vibrate with a tectonic plate shifting low end, both musically and vocally and lyrically. The vast bellows and discordant screams talk of oceanic depths ("Oceans") and the end of worlds ("Dead in the Park"), with fitting cavernous depth and swelling, earth sundering, drawn out droning riffs. The choking sounds that end the shorter "Oceans" is a fitting climax that actually personifies the emotion tied with listening to this album. The 20-minute "Dead in the Park" made me truly uncomfortable; nervous and gaunt with frayed emotions pummeled into submission by the sheer colossal onus that Otesanek create with their shuddering noise. Again, not an album worth colorful coloquilisms, as it essentially deadens your senses and leaves you bereft of many thought processes by grinding your subconscious into a pulp with their crushing avoirdupois. What lifts Otesanek slightly from the realm of pure noise is the agonized vocals that give this monster some appeal to slightly less open minded fans (like me) that find pure two-note noise unfathomable, and make Otesanek flirt with a more classic doom/death sound that gives you some glimmer of warm familiarity amid the overbearing density. Stoner Rock dot com (Velcro Lewis) Otesanek's self-titled debut album is pounding, slow Khanate style dirge. The tempos are so slow that you seem to lose track of time listening to this disc. The two tracks that make up this monster, "Oceans" and "Dead In the Park", are long and creeping. Picture a huge gargantuan slug sliming its way through a city, screaming and growling uncontrollably at everything in its way, stopping at intervals to rip a water tower apart and flooding the streets. When I say Otesanek are in the vein of Khanate, I mean it. They both use similar guitar tones/tuning, same pacing, and both are equally vile. At first I thought this might have been some leftover tracks from Things Viral, but after listening to this meditatively a few times I started to pick up the nuances and intricacies that set the two apart. Otesanek utilize more space and add a little more movement to their pieces. The vocals are not a focal point here, rather it’s the extremity of the slow pulse of the band. Seriously, I have no idea how its humanly possible to play something this plodding so tightly. You can set your watch to this band, if you had a timepiece made specifically to track the movement of continental drifts that is. In the past two years there have been some great long playing EPs, Pelican's Untitled and Buried At Sea's Migration, and similar to those records, this EP clocks in at about half an hour. If this "Epic EP" trend keeps growing we may want to rethink the definition of the LP. Don't forget those early Van Halen records were no longer than 32 minutes and were considered full albums. Otesanek are a great counterpart to the monumental drone doom bands: Khantae, Burning Witch, Unearthly Trance, and Buried At sea. This disc sounds great played loud and in its entirety. I'm looking forward to their next offering. Stoner Rock dot com (DearOldBlighty) Two songs: 30 minutes. Rings in like a vicious marriage of Khanate and Unearthly Trance. Sparse guitars toll emptily in the distance, swelling to a massive din akin to pendulums the size of ocean liners made of granite and steel crashing together in slow tidelike rhythms, while the pounding percussion fills in the gaps between collisions. This is good shit. One of the vocalists has a mid to upper register yell/shriek similar to the guy from Unearthly Trance. The other is a lower quasi-death grunt. The recording is also similar to U. T., hollow and a bit fuzzed out. The song structures are midway between the two Khanate albums, lots of empty space, but never veering into the overly ambient territory that "Things Viral" could be accused of. If you, like me, enjoy exploring the more bleak and extreme territories covered by the all encroaching ash of DOOOOM the Otesanek deserves your immediate attention. Under The Volcano issue #82 (Chuck Foster) Otesanek are the most extreme Sludgecore band I've heard since LA's forgotten Hell-crushers, Sleestak. These guys are kinda like Earth with some semblance of a beat. Recommended for people who like to have their heads pounded by sledgehammers at a slow and agonizing pace.