ALBUM REVIEW: Azketem – Azketem
Unlike many one man acts, Germany’s AZKETEM have managed to craft a very powerful and effective sound for themselves in just a few short years. Playing in a style that strikes a fine balance between classic black metal and a more atmosphere-driven sound, the Berlin band’s first album Azetik was an incredibly dark and claustrophobic offering, if a little rough around the edges. Their latest record, Azketem, not only strips away much of the murk that was present in the last record’s sound, but also subtly develops the band’s style into something a bit more bombastic.
After the hauntingly ambient Intro sets an ethereal stage, the music rather abruptly morphs into the first proper song on the album: Schwarze Schwäne. This takes the over-riding atmosphere of the short instrumental that the album began on and applies vast guitars, rumbling vocals and authoritative drumming, making for an expansive and epic sound, with only a few harsher vocal passages lending a darker edge. It’s a steady and hypnotic way to start this record, but it proves incredibly effective at grabbing the listener’s attention with its murky and engrossing sound. Nordtor, another lengthy and powerful piece of music, follows a similar formula, with measured musicianship and sonorous vocals creating a bombastic tone, but crucially it opts for a denser, bleaker style of guitar playing that subtly shifts into a harder, melancholic direction that still blends together post-rock and black metal extremely well, introducing gothic hints to further add to this song’s grand sound. Prelude is another brief but beguiling offering that adopts a more minimalist approach, and it acts as a great segue into the next few tracks.
Azetik sees the performance on all fronts become livelier, with sharp drum fills, weightier rhythms and a heavier sound making this feel gargantuan where the first two tracks felt quite reserved. It’s a natural progression of this album’s sound, with polished guitars built upon more pronounced hooks, making this particular track sound even more cavernous. Maere, much like Schwarze Schwäne, takes the enigmatic template of its predecessor and makes everything sound sombre, with the guitars and bass playing a much more significant role, and the dark melodicism standing in stark contrast to the thick, commanding vocals, edging gradually towards something more animated and impactful.
Tötval takes the sinister sound of the previous track’s closing moments and expands upon them, proving to be perhaps the most traditional black metal effort on the album, although there’s still plenty of room for the excellent, crystalline guitars and domineering vocals, providing the best examples of both this record’s fiercer and lighter sides, and concluding the album proper on one of its strongest tracks. Fallen Crescent, a relatively short and reserved piece of post-rock with thin, almost imperceptible vocals, is impressive, but feels like an afterthought, being far closer to the two instrumental tracks that featured earlier on the album, though effective nonetheless.
Comparing this to 2022’s Azetik, there are clear musical similarities, but the two records sound very different to each other. The markedly more polished production on Azketem certainly goes a long way to making AZKETEM‘s sound not only cleaner and sharper, but decidedly more atmospheric where the songs on its predecessor were much more harsh and raw, with even some hints of goth adding yet another layer to the band’s already huge and immersive sound. Some of the intensity from their debut hasn’t quite translated over onto this record, particularly its first half, but there’s enough imaginative hooks and solid performances to make this a much more effective and cohesive album. If some of that harshness were to return in the future, AZKETEM will be onto a winning formula. It’s great to hear an album that leans towards black metal’s more atmospheric side in a way that sounds genuinely atmospheric, and it’s a sound that, if explored further, could provide a template for modern atmospheric black metal that is much more impressive than that style has been in recent memory.
Rating: 8/10
Azketem is out now via Darkness Shall Rise Productions.
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