The Ocean
Pelagial

For every band devoted to “thinking” metal, the fateful moment of the concept arrives sooner or later. For an extraordinary band like the Ocean, for whom the concept is the rule and not the exception, the ambition bar is raised even higher: reaching the sixth full-length, after a series of works ranging from good to excellent, including the last two superlative cousin albums “Heliocentric” and “Anthropocentric”, mirror parts of the same concept (indeed!), the physiological challenging goal remains the album-suite.

And so it was: “Pelagial,” the latest musical creation released by the German band led by the tireless Robin Staps, is a long composition of fifty-three minutes, divided into eleven tracks only for the listener’s convenience. First point in favor of the Ocean: unlike many other similar situations (look at “The Incident” by Porcupine Tree, but many other, and more illustrious, examples can be made, like the now-mythical “A Pleasant Shade of Gray” by Fates Warning) “Pelagial” is not the typical bunch of loosely connected songs with some interlude and two/three recurring themes that sound “so cool”, but a true composition, a single sound stream whose parts taken individually have (and rightly so) little sense.

It certainly helps that the album was conceived, composed, and played as instrumental (except for a couple of pieces that were originally meant to host vocals), a choice also dictated by the vocal cord issues reported by the singer (now a permanent member of the collective) Loic Rossetti. Only after the recordings were completed would Rossetti declare himself able to lend his vocal cords to the project: not a bad result, considering that the singer had to adapt to a ready-made and refined base destined to remain such and instrumental.

So a unique composition, it was said, where the division into chapters remains functional in expressing the “gradual” nature of the concept illustrated (not a new approach in the band’s history, which adopted a similar approach with “Precambrian”): “Pelagial” aims to describe the different phases that characterize the progressive descent into the sea’s depths (true artistic destination, in all senses, for a band named Ocean). A process of progressive immersion that does not resolve into a mere question of pressure (the idea would be to describe the sensations of increasing pressure experienced when descending from the surface to the most unfathomable depths of the water mass, and the music should accordingly, proceed in a fluid manner, from the elegant jazzy piano of the opening to the oppressive doom imposed in the concluding part of the work): outside the metaphor (the “marine” one, I mean), the journey can have different meanings, both psychological and existential, and it is no coincidence that the album’s writing process takes inspiration from the film “Stalker” by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, ostensibly science fiction, which narrates the exhausting search for the “Zone”, the room where dreams and desires can come true, outside of any physics law. Only for copyright reasons, the film’s dialogues did not become the lyrics that would have been narrated by an off-screen voice (original idea by Staps) to be embedded along the multi-layered instrumental block that constitutes the album’s corpus.

Now, let's make an unpleasant reflection: if we took a petty old-school metalhead, froze him in 1984, and woke him up now, he probably wouldn’t believe his ears: a fifty-three-minute suite? Jazzy piano? Tarkovsky? Could metal really have reached this level of sublimation? Indeed, from a formal point of view, the Ocean is undoubtedly the cutting edge of today’s metal: somewhere between Isis, Opeth, and the inevitable Tool (with significant turns towards the instrumental post-rock of various Explosions in the Sky and Pelican), they manage to combine melody, technique, power, and intelligence more than most of their colleagues can do with guitars, bass, and drums. But not only that, if we took the bitter enemy of the petty metalhead of 1984, the obtuse nice guy from the parish who listened to Madonna and Concato in the same years, and made him listen to “Palegial”, we could finally shout in his ear: “You see, jerk, that metal is not just noise and that metalheads can play better than Simply Red???”. These are facts, but this is not where the discussion about The Ocean ends or exhausts itself.

My friends, I reveal my mission: today my task is not to praise perhaps one of the best albums of the year in post-metal, the result of the commitment and professionalism of one of the best bands around; instead, I am here to tell you that if this is the best metal can offer today, then metal is in bad shape. Or rather, it is always in the same state. In essence: even the new metallic generations, no matter how evolved, refined, more open, competent, with greater taste, can talk to me about Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov, but they hopelessly retain the narrow-mindedness of their ancestors (but not the genius), amplified by a horizontal knowledge that allows embracing wider horizons (and it is no coincidence that the evolution process ends up coinciding with contamination rather than invention), but it does not allow for going in-depth, as if the attention span had lowered, as if more were known, but in a more superficial way. And it is a paradox to state this when listening to a work that intends to dig deep.

Let me give you an example: we could also clap our hands raw in applause in front of a flawless work like “Pelagial”, maybe these are unusual refinements in these parts, and they might even smell of novelty (but not so much, given that since “Panopticon” Isis have popularized these sounds to all winds, and it was 2004, almost ten years ago): post-rock is evidently the most chic way to play metal today, but what is post-rock today? Post-rock is a genre past its prime, for several years now, that if taken as a paradigm by the artists most “in” at the moment, these would be pelted with tomatoes without mercy, by audiences and specialized critics (let alone music historians). And without bothering people like Slint or Tortoise, but rather sticking to a work like “Young Team” by Mogwai, we can frankly state that that album, where the enlightened Scots had already practically codified the genre in the formula that prevails today (that of the long instrumental suite and the tear-jerking emotional crescendo), was from 1997 and hence sixteen years old. So you understand what I mean when I speak of the metal community’s narrow-mindedness? To perceive (and make seem) fresh things from fifteen years earlier. Fifteen years are the years that pass, for example, between “In the Court of the Crimson King”, the baptismal font of progressive rock, and “Ride The Lightning”, the album that more than others changed the face of extreme metal: two different geological eras. Post-rock, instead, for the metalhead is still new today, and think that among these there are still those who haven't digested it.

But the problem isn’t even with post-rock, the problem is the fact that the album doesn’t hold up conceptually. I have read and re-read in various reviews this phantasmagoric idea of music that becomes heavier as the listening progresses, as the concept demands. And yet no!, the Ocean don’t have the guts to follow through on the premises. It's true, they start light and arrive heavy, but in the middle, a bit of everything happens and there’s no linear progression: the sound gets heavier (at one point it even becomes death metal complete with blast-beats), then lightens (there's even a ballad that borders on neo-melodic Neapolitan), then gets heavy again, etc., and it’s also good, goddammit, because otherwise, the listening would indeed have been really heavy. But if you had to convey the idea of the search, the arduous search, the existential search, the search that costs effort, commitment, waiting, damn it, that search that, even in pain and boredom, makes you grow, in fact, the album is too indulgent with the listener, ending up entertaining with beautiful melodies and atmosphere changes that sound captivating in their sequence, but that ultimately leave nothing: once the silence after the fifty-third minute arrives, the feeling is to always be the same as ever, having spent fifty-three pleasant minutes. “Stalker”, Tarkovsky’s film, was a pain in the ass, no joking, but at least it left you with a sense of fullness that “Pelagial” doesn’t even dream of (am I expecting too much? But then let’s take “Dreaming Neon Black” by Nevermore, now that was a descent into the unconscious’s hells!).

Beautiful melodies and beautiful time changes, therefore, well-orchestrated sound stratification and a profusion of technicalities (particularly on the front of the rhythms and guitar intertwinings), but almost never (except for some truly, but truly spot-on melodic passages) does it touch the true stroke of genius (and “Panopticon” was full of these strokes of genius, and also of heart, which in my opinion has always been missing in the music of Ocean).

Another problem: this inability to synthesize the right solution and render it in the most functional way possible, exalting it in the right context, with the right waiting: these modern metalheads are capable of everything, but not of choosing, nor of waiting, let alone if we talk about a fifty-three-minute song, where the modus operandi automatically translates into “free rein to everything that goes through the head and hands” (in this “Heliocentric” seemed less dispersive). Such is Staps' inability to choose (and this I sense a weakness on the part of the leader, or at least his unconscious inability to fully believe in his work), that in the packaging (careful as always) we find two CDs: the official version, the one sung by Rossetti, and the original, the instrumental one, as if with the first something important of the second was lost that cannot be renounced, something that has been decided to save in the form of a bonus-disc. A version that I instead wanted to listen to carefully, because, not particularly loving Rossetti's vocal tone, I was hoping to find the real masterpiece, which I did not find, since if on one hand this version allows for grasping more vividly the meticulous work done by the band on the compositional and performance side, on the other side listening becomes a bit more strenuous, also because it is understood that the suite is ultimately composed of little pieces, many little pieces, many tiny little pieces, put one after the other, without presenting in their ensemble that stature of “continuum” (as if the band knew how to play, and a lot, but not enough to handle with maturity and sensitivity of a truly adult musician a real symphony, although always talking about metal), a continuum that, on a superficial listening, behind the deceptive facade of Rossetti's performance, seemed to tempt and recognize.

Finally, Rossetti's voice: frankly, I never tolerated it, it reminds me of Marco Carta singing post-hardcore. Technically gifted, poor guy, he goes out of his way experimenting with various registers, very in-tune in the clean (although his setup appears polished and aseptic to me, typical of one who exits a talent show), less convincing in growl (not powerful at all). Rossetti’s voice, let's say it, fancy-ups the music of Ocean, which already a bit fancy of its own it is: the difference between old school and today’s metal, I would think, is the same as between the old barbers of yesteryear, who for a shitty cut made you waste an entire day, you were forced to undergo the most trivial conversations (but at least you could sneak a read of a porno comic), and today’s photonic hairdressers, super quick and super competent, half an hour amidst the din of techno and the roar of twenty hairdryers blasted simultaneously, to come out with a shitty cut anyway.

But hair grows back, and if despite all this drivel you find the maximum of votes at the top of the review, it’s because it is literally impossible (and as a reviewer I would have sinned of dishonesty) not to recognize the very high merits of these guys who, with all the limitations they carry (they are metalheads, after all, right?), manage to produce a perfect work, meticulously accurate, with stunning sounds and instrumental textures (supported here and there by a string ensemble and a beautiful classical piano) that certainly elicit envy from many, inside and outside the metal border. So listen to it, and don't pay attention to a fool, read the other reviews, which are better written.

Goodbye.

Memento