Independent Release
Review by Vard Aman
Transliterated as Oksiderika or Oxiderika (I’m going to use the latter). Oxiderika are from Samara in Russia. They formed in 2011, and are therefore quite a young band; and also quite an inexperienced band which unfortunately shows on their debut album, “Step to Darkness”. At just under 30 minutes long, and with a rather poor demo-like sound quality, it would have been better to have published this as a demo rather than as an album, because a demo is really what it is. Every band has to start out somewhere, and every band will grow with experience, and “Step to Darkness” is just the beginning for Oxiderika. Hopefully in the future, the title of the album will be looked back on as being quite apt – I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. For now, I shall try to ignore the sound quality and focus on the music itself. The music itself (Symphonic Metal) also comes across as being the product of a band that is fairly inexperienced, but there are moments on this album that reveals a band with some real potential that will certainly be realized if they keep at it and continue to develop.
Moments revealing their potential (and atmospheric potential they have in abundance) can be found in the songs “Край”, “Шаг во Тьму” and “Трон Четырех Ветров”, and if Oxiderika continue to work on material like this and perfect it, they will be a band that will find themselves high up on my favourite list and the favourite lists of many others no doubt. The other material is somewhat generic and fails to excite me. The intro to “300 Лет” has a beautiful dark and empty haunting feel to it, which is fantastic; but after the intro it degenerates into a song that… well… let’s just say that such a well written and atmospheric intro deserves a much, much better song to belong to.
The vocalist, Valeria Frolova, is more than competent; as are the rest of the musicians, so both technically and artistically there should be nothing holding this band back. They just need to keep developing on what they have started, and begin creating their own sound which they have already shown glimpses of; and if they take the darker, more atmospheric route (the side of Oxiderika I preferred) they have the potential to develop into something great. Watch this space!
Rating – 65/100
Tracklist
- Край [Kray – Edge]
- Ворон [Voron – Raven]
- Шаг во Тьму [Shag vo T’mu – Step to Darkness]
- Демон [Demon]
- 300 Лет [300 Let – 300 Years]
- Трон Четырех Ветров [Tron Chetiyrekh Vetrov – Throne of the Four Winds]
- Я и Ты [Ya i Tiy – Me and You]
Line Up
- Valeria Frolova – Vocals
- Alexey Riskulov – Guitars
- Alexey Beller – Guitars
- Vasya Frolov – Bass & Vocals
- Vladislav Kozhevnikov – Drums
Links