The Ocean Collective - Phanerozoic I: Paleozoic

The musical collective often simply referred to as The Ocean is back after their 2013 prog sludge opus, Pelagic, with their seventh full length, which appears to be the first of two parts. The now much smaller and often ecologically/evolutionarily minded collective continues their poetic and symbolic lyrical focus around certain periods of Earth’s prehistoric history with Phanerozoic.

As a fan introduced to them via their early sludge-driven albums, with a special liking for 2007’s Precambrian, I was hoping perhaps a but more heaviness was perhaps in store for The Ocean. I enjoyed the melodic, oceanic-themed Pelagic, but I was kind of missing that essential urgency their more sludgy material brought.

This album, though, follows mostly in the footsteps of the melodic prog direction Pelagic led the band toward after Heliocentric and Anthropocentric built the foundations for it. I’d say that this first volume find the band tending more toward an early Dan Tompkins-era TesseracT sound and sounding a bit more natural in that realm than the kind of unsure prog they were making on Pelagic (which I still liked). The band definitely slather on a thick coat of dynamic prog with a bit more of a sense of direction and melody this time.

Songs like “Sirurian: Age of Sea Scorpions” balance the band’s knack for brooding atmosphere and melody with their more aggressive side (still not quite as vicious as something off, say, Fluxion, though), while finding the band working in these intricate layers of strings and pianos, while the epic closer, “Permian: The Great Dying”, works in some similarly tasty bass lining and symphonic backing over its convincing vocal melodies.

If there is one thing holding this album back, it’s perhaps its lack of identity in the instrumental department (and vocal department to a degree as well). The band write and perform quite competently and they certainly have a firm grasp on the genre’s appeals and how to make appealing use of its key aspects. But for all their ability, The Ocean have a hard time really making particulaly memorable prog metal on this album and struggle to establish a notably distinct identity for themselves too. It is very easy to pick out the band’s similarities to their obvious influences at most points throughout the album, from the very Tool/Soen-esque “Devonian: Nascent”, with some modern Gojira influence on the vocals near the end of the track, to the Mastodon and Textures-inspired moments peppered all across the track list.

This is not to say that this album is a rip-off of other bands in The Ocean’s field, but at an instrumental level, it still feels like there’s not really anything to define what their sound is like, which at the core I don’t have a problem with, but they are playing a comsistent style that seems more drawn from other artists than from their own musical direction. Again it’s fine, but they definitely succumbed to the risk of blending in with it. And this is not a problem exclusive to this album. The Ocean have been difficult to associate a unique signifier to for a good number of their albums, but with the meagerness of this one, it perhaps becomes more dramatic. The very palpable cues the band took from groups like Between the Buried and Me, Tool, Opeth, TesseracT, and Mastodon are perhaps more distracting on this album than they have ever been on any previous The Ocean album.

For what it’s worth, it’s certainly an enjoyable prog metal album with a nice variety of atmospheres and vocal melodies, but for a band as ambitious as The Ocean usually are, it just feels a little underwhelming and not particularly special for them. Hopefully the band get a little more courageous with the second installment.