HTETHTHEMETH — Best Worst Case Scenario (review)

HTETHTHEMETH — Best Worst Case Scenario album cover

Album · 2016 · Avant-garde Metal

3/5 · 2024-07-18
siLLy puPPy

This bizarre Romanian avant-metal act from Brașov has its roots in a brainstorming philosophical conversation that took place as far back in 1999 when Lao Kreegan revealed to his friend Jamm Klirk a series of dreams he had been having which inspired him to create a musical project. In this dream a fallen angel came to Kreegan and revealed himself as the unpronounceable HTETHTHMETH and had a tale to tell that would make its way into the new project which was supposed to be titled “Moldy Walls With Joints” however after a few years of floating around ideas and compiling musical chops to accompany such an album, it seems Kreegan was the one with the passion to carry through with Klirk dropping out of the project. Undeterred Kreegan carried on and slowly pieced together a band that would be named after the fallen angel who inspired it all to begin with.

Throughout the 2010s HTETHTHEMETH developed its ideas and released its first three songs on a split album with The Bipolar Disorder and then releasing one of those tracks “Light Lies” as a single the following year. The year 2013 finally found the stable lineup of Robert Cotoros (guitar), Lucian Popa (guitar), Vlad Andrei Onescu (keyboards), Koldr (bass) and Costea Codrut (drums) with Kreegan handling the vocals. The band’s sole album release would emerge in 2016 as BEST WORST CASE SCENARIO which found the band in full theatrical mode with a musical style that was loosely based on gothic metal but incorporated a wide variety of metal styles including death, thrash, classic heavy, alternative and even a bit of bluesy 70s hard rock amongst others. Add to that moments of Romanian folk music, classical, bossa nova, progressive rock and even some strange exotica and what you end up with is Romania’s answer to Slovenia’s Devil Doll.

BEST WORST CASE SCENARIO features three distinct Acts broken down into a total of 15 tracks. The album is quite lengthy and just misses a 76-minute playing time. A concept album which narrates a guy looking for the perfect woman and ultimately fails and turns to the dark side in the form of hate as HTETHTHEMETH however for the most part these sorts of nebulous concepts don’t really grab me as i’m more engaged in the music itself which is a wild ride through treacherous turf throughout the album’s three acts and myriad tracks. Honestly i don’t find that the acts themselves are rather distinguishable from one another and musically speaking the album doesn’t really convey the story at hand although it does represent the strangeness of how dreams usually don’t logically and cohesively translate into a reality situation as musical motifs just sort of morph into others with no rhyme or reason however the album does maintain a melodic connective flow which at least makes it accessible.

An inserting idea for sure but HTETHTHEMETH seems to have bitten off more than it can chew with a monstrously epic tale that is supposed to narrate a tale delivered by the fallen angel in his dreams. This album seriously sounds like it’s trying to emulate Devil Doll however Lao Kreegan is no Mr Doctor and lacks both the charisma and the vocal octave range to pull it off. Likewise there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to how the music is supposed to evoke the storyline and even when the concept is totally ignored simply sounds like a haphazard journey through various musical motifs and corny cadences that simply don’t always work together. There are lots of great individual tracks on here especially the more metallic moments that merge with progressive rock but some of the non-metal tracks can sound a bit ridiculous! It’s a decent album to check out but hardly something that holds up with repeated listening sessions. Sometimes disjointed can serve a purpose but in the case of BEST WORST CASE SCENARIO it sort of loses all effects. A better vocalist could’ve animated this to another level though.