Here Where Nothing Grows

There's been a ton of post-metal/doom metal/post-doom/post-neurosis/art metal/whatever released recently, and that’s a good thing, because while the genre is slowly getting crowded, it’s getting better and more diverse, with some bands playing really melodic stuff while other bands are making doom more depressing, downtrodden and slow then ever before. This album is a bit closer to the darker side of doom.

Oceans are not what you'd call accessible. It's not as much of a downer as bands like Khanate, but it's hardly uplifting. Long songs, very sparse in arrangements, slowly building up over a very long time. This would sound like absolute mush if it was done by lesser hands, but the Ocean dudes handle it brilliantly, creating an absorbing, epic album, that can probably be best described as a slower, drawn out version of early Isis.

While there's a fair bit of variety in every song, each song has a similar kind of sound. The fairly down tuned guitars chug along, super heavy and slow, (there is one fast bit in The Fall though, it’s pretty awesome!) while the drums slowly pound away. The slowness is really something.. I mean it's not Sunn O))) tempos, but it's not much faster then that, and the slow, constant pounding of the drums give it an extra grind that Stephen O'Malley's never been able to get. The arrangements are really amazingly sparse and empty, it's incredible. After the guitars pound away for a while, a clean guitar normally enters the mix. It relieves the pressure but it's just as eerie and foreboding as the distorted guitars. Yet, while all the instrumental parts are really quite awesome, most of the vocal parts are fairly lacking. The singer doesn’t have a bad scream to him, but he needs to use it less (though it’s really used already), because just when you’re digging an awesome clean part, the screamed vocals come in. It’s fine for him to do it in the super heavy bits, just not in the clean parts. Hopefully that’ll be fixed next album.

While the vocals can be very annoying, the rest of this album is really, really good, with everything perfectly in place. It really goes to show that you don’t need to fill a song with layers to make a good album. Highly recommended for fans of doom/art metal or whatever it’s being called these days.