The Ocean is a revolving group of musicians around Berlin who've just recorded a concept album. That's right: the title says it all. This is an album about the Precambrian era.
In these two disks, you'll find twenty minutes on the Hadean & Archean periods, in which the Earth was pretty much a big ball of fire. The music reflects this. The riffs go CHUGCHUGGACHUGGACHUG and the bass drum goes DUBBADUBBADUBBADUB and the vocals go GRARARAAA, GRARARARRAAAAAAUGGH!! It's not the best stuff out there, or the most original, but it's a step up for fans of generic noisy American bands. The unusual rhythms and growly chords are pleasers, and the singer does sound as though he would break into one's house and tear one's wife in half. Even given the fun rhythms and crushing guitar, it's the second disk that gets exciting.
We begin the second disk with an echoing guitar and mournful saxophone that seem to echo down an empty street though soup-thick fog. Is this Casablanca? Is it Cowboy Bebop? No: this is the Proterozoic!
Track two picks up on the first's coda and takes it for a walk through gentle territory like a respite in an Opeth epic, oddly maintaining a second vocalist who sounds like he just came from a bar fight. Two minutes in, we're reminded that, yes, this is a metal album when they break out a melodic but angry guitar line and the barfly starts shouting again. By four minutes in, piano and cello (I think?) have softened the scene again. Anyone who wishes that the loud guy from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones could be Opeth's lead singer is REALLY in luck. Then, six minutes in: GRRAAAAAAUUGH!!
The rest is along the same lines. I still don't have enough metal experience to classify this baby, but I get the feeling that neither would anyone else. It has excellent melodic elements and bone-crushing, brutal heaviness that go well together. The pace changes dramatically from the Hadean (hammering, but this is no speedcore) to the ponderous pace of the slower Proterozoic elements. Time signatures vary: plenty of the two disks will be in 3/4, like much metal, but others are in evidence. The styles change widely, probably because the line-up of this group changed from session to session. Yes, there is one voice-over from an obscure movie. Also of note are the lyrics. The Ocean tends to write about one or both of two things: being overwhelmed, alienated and absorbed by modern job culture, and (surprise surprise) DROWNING IN THE OCEAN. The only way to tell the difference is to look up the lyrics online. I was somewhat surprised by the lack of lyrics discussing plate tectonics, the evolution of sexual reproduction, or the Oxygen Crisis, but I got over it. There must be a metaphor somewhere. Besides, it's not like anyone was around for the Precambrian - for all I know, that's what everyone was talking about back then.
If one is looking for variety in one's sonic brutality, this is a good place to start. On some tracks, I think to myself, this is the kind of thing that King Crimson might have done if they'd been Germans who got together in 2000, and if all of the breakups and reformations had occurred in the space of one album. On others, I think, GRRAAAAAAAUGH!!
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