The Ocean - Heliocentric (4.5/5)

01. Shamayim 01:53 02. Firmament 07:29 03. The First Commandment of the Luminaries 06:47 04. Ptolemy Was Wrong 06:28 05. Metaphysics of the Hangman 05:41 06. Catharsis of a Heretic 02:08 07. Swallowed by the Earth 04:59 08. Epiphany 03:21 09. The Origin of Species 07:23 10. The Origin of God 04:33

I’ve heard a lot of interesting things about The Ocean. Their origins lie in The Ocean Collective, a small army of creative types that founder and guitarist Robin Staps set up in the basement of an old aluminium factory in Berlin. They’ve been through 30-40 members, and have toured all over the world supporting the likes of Opeth and Cult of Luna. Their biography is so complex that you actually have to download it in a Word document from their website…I could go on for hours. The most important fact for right now, though, is that they’ve just released their fourth studio album, ‘Heliocentric’.

Frankly, the only way to “get” what The Ocean are really about, is to take a listen to their music. ‘Heliocentric’ is…well, it’s ambitious. It’s a simply mad album. It’s got a little bit of just about everything, from orchestral-backed jazz piano to double-bass drumming and growled death vocals. It’s sort of like a marriage between Opeth and The Mars Volta, at least in terms of vision and sheer manic ambition. It’s hard to sum up the scope of the album as a whole, really, so let’s go track-by-track…

“Firmament” establishes matters on a firmly barmy note. It lurches with terrifying precision from one extreme to another, taking the quiet-loud dynamic to a whole new level as guttural roars are swapped for melodic singing, and fast, complex passages intertwine with quiet acoustic segments. It’s crazed, schizophrenic music on the same mental plane as something like Dillinger Escape Plan, although more prog than mathcore. The song as a whole feels like some kind of epic journey, the sort of thing you do in a gap year after school that markedly changes your perception of the world, and it sets the tone for the album perfectly. It will also no doubt act as a fairly effective Cerberus at the gates; a test of commitment and sheer mental fortitude that may prove too much for some listeners. I suspect that many will fall at this first hurdle.

No, this is not music for the weak-willed or unadventurous. It’s tempting to think “The First Commandment of the Luminaries” is heading along more predictable kind of lines to start with, but halfway through you realise you’re listening to a jazz piano interlude…before another elephantine riff crashes through it, like an alien bursting out of the chest of an unsuspecting film cliché. And then, then “Ptolemy Was Wrong” comes along as a soulful piano ballad, building to a majestic climax complete with orchestral backing…I mean, that’s just about the last thing I was expecting. Listening to ‘Heliocentric’ for the first time is like experimenting with some terrible hallucinogenic drug that utterly fucks your entire field of perception. It seizes hold of your brain stem, demands that you concentrate on it until you can begin to understand it. As Loïc Rossetti sings in “Ptolemy Was Wrong“, “it’s like nothing I’ve seen was for real”.

“Swallowed By The Earth” features a massive, sludgey breakdown that Cult of Luna would be proud of, and is followed by “Epiphany” which is another quirky orchestral piano ballad. It’s not like a Dean Martin number or something, though; there’s quite a dark edge to everything that The Ocean play. As if to underline this, “Epiphany” is followed by “Origin of Species”, which is perhaps the heaviest track on the album; it’s like ‘Blackwater Park‘-era Opeth, but with a dark little violin interlude in the middle. It runs as a kind of bizarre double-act with album closer “Origin of God”, which features an actual sax solo, and when the final chord fades you’re left with the impression you’ve just been hit by a musical truck. ‘Heliocentric’ boils down seven or eight seemingly disparate musical styles into a thick, viscous soup, which it then pastes around a shovel which it hits you repeatedly over the head with. The only advice I can give to those who get to this point is that the best cure is ‘hair of the dog’. Put the CD back to track one and take another hit, and after a while, it might start to make sense. Almost.

It’s hard to find words to describe The Ocean. They create something that’s so utterly massive, grand and majestic, and yet dense and complex…the scope of their vision is so vast that it’s hard to actually take it all in. It would be like trying to look at the Earth itself, and the fact that a single band could conceive of the whole thing just underlines that they’re somewhere in orbit, way, way out there, looking down at the rest of us. Which is why they might seem so utterly alien to a lot of people; ‘challenging’ hardly seems a strong enough word. ’Heliocentric’ is the god-damn cutting edge of experimental metal, 50 minutes of utterly exhilarating madness, and while it’s certainly not for everyone, you might have picked up by now on the fact that I bloody love it.

Heliocentric is available to buy or download at Play.com

Genre : Progressive Metal

Article by Phil Sim