I admire bands with ambition, and Berlin’s progressive doom metal collective The Ocean have ambition to burn. Of course, one man’s ambition is another’s pretension, as the execution of The Ocean’s latest album Precambrian demonstrates – it’s the sort of work that will divide opinion.
The Ocean’s statement of intent for the album includes the following:
“Precambrian is our stance against MySpace-induced volatileness and transience, against the postmodern notion of music as unseizable data … an album for people who still believe in the idea that an album can be more, and should be more, than the sum of its tracks.”
See what I mean? Ambitious, but pretentious … not to mention a trifle disingenuous. Sure, MySpace and the other forces of digital media and web2.0 have resulted in some terribly ephemeral dross sloshing about in the world of music.
But the corollary is that it’s easier for more obscure and niche-interest musicians to reach their audiences – in other words, The Ocean seem to be arguing against their own potential growth. It’s worth noting that they don’t despise MySpace enough to not have a presence there; business is business, after all.
Let’s leave intent aside, and pay attention to the album itself. It’s an elegant physical package – a two disc digipack with a lush black finish and booklets printed gloss-on-matte in a manner that’ll have Tool’s design people taking notes for future reference. As an artefact, it’s magnificent; Martin Kvamme isn’t Mike Patton’s artist of choice for nothing.
But as the band point out, music-as-artefact is increasingly irrelevant – I can’t look at the packaging while I’m out doing the shopping, but I can be cranking the music out on my mp3 player while I’m choosing my fruit and veg. It’s the tunes that count.
It’s fair to say that fans of instantaneous and immediate punk and metal will find Precambrian is lost on them. Fans of more progressive and baroque forms, however, should find a great deal to get excited about; The Ocean bring a vast range of styles and textures into play to create an album whose ambition is equalled by its staggering musicianship and composition.
The Precambrian was a geological timeframe when the Earth was going through its earliest stages of evolution, and The Ocean’s album concept is loosely connected to the changes the planet experienced during this time. Each track is named after an era or period within the Precambrian, from the Hadean eon of roiling lava flows to the emergence of simple aquatic lifeforms in the Proterozoic.
This chronology allows Precambrian to flow from almost relentless savagery and turmoil to alternating phases of delicate calm and erupting brutality. The first disc, covering the Hadean and Archean eons, is a barrage of extremely heavy technical metal with crushing chords and bellowed vocals dominating the soundscape.
Proterozoic opens out wider to encompass more instruments and approaches, with classical influences creeping in - piano and clean vocals are as likely to sketch out subtle figures and moments of tranquillity as the powerful guitars and howling are to evoke explosive change.
As with any concept album truly worthy of the name, Precambrian is best considered as a totality. In isolation the songs are fine examples of progressive technical metal - but as a whole, Precambrian is a suite of interlocking complexity that has to be absorbed as originally intended for its ambition and achievement to be truly appreciated.
As The Ocean have made clear, a lot of “the kids” won’t be into that. The market for three-minute throwaway pop is massive, and bubblegum punk isn’t designed for contemplation or deep examination.
But I’m not convinced that’s such a new thing – MySpace may have made it more obvious, but I don’t think it’s the root cause of disposable music, which has arguably been a predominant feature of the landscape since the sixties.
I remain convinced there are probably more people open to the majestic conceptual works being assembled by The Ocean and their contemporaries than ever before. And thanks to the internet they have a better chance of discovering the existence of Precambrian, which stands as a landmark to ambition met and bested - as well as being an essential addition to the collection of any fan of modern progressive metal.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: concept, doom, metal, prog, technical metal
