Oktor were the first to dive into funeral in Poland after the seminal Gallileous; the trio from Warsaw recorded between 2004 and 2005 an ep and a split album with the Czech Quercus and the English The River. It was a first approach that immediately highlighted the merits and flaws of the group that would then reappear in the second phase of the career, with a sound rather rarefied and characterized by an alternation between heavier passages, with the use of growl, and other more caressing, accompanied by clean vocals. After this taste, a collection was released in 2007, but we had to wait a long time before finding unreleased material by the trio formed by Jerzy Rajkow-Krzywicki (ch, bs, ts, bt, vc), Jan Rajkow-Krzywicki (ch, bt, vc) and Piotr Kucharek (clean vc). Another Dimensions Of Pain is released in the year and, although it exhibits natural progress compared to what was done almost ten years before, it doesn’t erase those slight lamenesses already highlighted; in fact, the sound appears fragmentary, with too many interlocutory moments that interrupt the flow of a funeral death doom sometimes even valuable. The assimilation of the parts in clean vocals, already not brilliant in itself, are not then facilitated by the use of the mother tongue, while to weigh everything down Oktor place between these tracks of the piano interludes really minimal. In short, despite an overall outcome far from deplorable, the feeling is that Oktor should better focus their proposal in a direction perhaps more linear but, at the same time, more homogeneous and effective.

2014 – Solitude Productions