Label: Century Media Records
Release date: September 4, 2020
Production: Oceans of Slumber
Album length: 71.38 min
Genre: Progressive Metal/ Death Metal/Doom Metal/Gothic Metal
Rating: 9.0/10
Oceans of Slumber are a new-generation American outfit, and they had good reason to self-title their fourth studio album. It’s the band’s fourth record, and just last year they went through the fire of “purification” and transformation. They swapped out three members and, with the addition of a keyboardist, grew from a quintet into a sextet. Both guitar spots and the bass have been filled by three new members since 2019. And since artistry in rock and metal generally grows out of the guitarists’ character, meaning the style and sound of their playing, this band’s new studio album wasn’t spared that either.
Even after the third album, critics liked to peg the band, somewhat unkindly, as a kind of “Opeth meets Skunk Anansie” (thanks to singer Cammie Gilbert’s vocals). The new album “Oceans of Slumber” is a waypoint in a further artistic transformation, and with it the band comes out with its most focused and fully realized ideas and solutions to date. The album brings a radical departure. Compared to the band’s previous three studio records, it’s a compact artistic swerve. It ties in most naturally, in evolutionary terms, with the predecessor, and yet the new album strings together a veritable ocean of fresh, untested artistic daring across a full 72 minutes of playing time, something the previous three albums, the last one included, can hardly match.
Deep, personal, confessional lyrics that on the other hand don’t shy away from socially critical bite come fully alive in the hands of Cammie Gilbert’s phenomenal voice, and nothing slips past her. At every moment, in every part of a given verse, she’s in exactly the right place, and with her recognizable vocal approach, all emotion and passion, she’s guaranteed to hit her expressive peak. She comes at every verse with extraordinary fire and feeling, showing a whole pleiad of different faces of what is really one and the same vocal story. Her voice is so strikingly distinctive, right in the heart of the band’s vocal vision, and so outstanding that it’s the key element with which Oceans of Slumber have carved out a recognizable artistic identity of their own. Next to her punch, the effect of the occasional (at moments hyper-produced) gnarly growls from both guitarists is pretty pale, even though the point of the move is to shift the atmosphere. One even wonders whether it makes sense at all.
The album is a tough nut to crack. It’s simply extremely long, and the band moves within a set framework fusing elements of technical-progressive death metal, doom metal and gothic metal too (check out the nearly seven-minute cover of the Type O Negative original Wolf Moon), while Cammie Gilbert’s vocals give it an R&B and soul hairdo. That certainly guarantees artistic challenge and expressive inventiveness. On the flip side, the whole thing feels a bit too long. A progressive band at its core, but with fusion starting points broad enough that they bring all these different genre elements of metal together in one place remarkably smoothly. That’s why the music stays interesting throughout, even though the album could easily be at least 15 minutes shorter and the band could have saved a few ideas for the next record. The album is varied and in the arrangements at times so loose that it takes several spins before it settles into your ear. At the same time, it richly rewards the listener. The predecessor “The Banished Heart” already had trouble with length, but then again that only shows the band’s enormous commitment and excitement to present all its new, artistically fresh ideas. Still, that doesn’t necessarily add up to a plus. As I said, in just a good 50 minutes the band already says everything essential about its artistic identity.
Still, the new album is by far the band’s most interesting artistic work. In every respect. With the new release, Oceans of Slumber have stretched out artistically and in their arrangements, delivering a markedly more colorful mix of brilliant technical polish from the band’s instrumental side, which with the two new guitarists has taken the expression up to an even higher level of quality, while the character of the guitar playing is further contrasted by an exploratory rhythm section that guarantees progressive flexibility for experimenting. There’s just the right dose of that on the album. Cammie Gilbert’s voice is, as I said, “out of this world,” and it’s thanks to her that Oceans of Slumber can spark interest even among the part of the metal crowd drawn to other branches of metal. Even among people who listen to pop and rock. No wonder Arjen Anthony Lucassen himself invited Cammie onto his new Ayreon album “Trinitus”, where the singer plays one of the more prominent roles.
A fourth album and a new birth for the band. The meaningful album title hints at exactly that. A new beginning, a leap to a higher level of artistic maturity. With “Oceans of Slumber” the band definitely hasn’t hit its creative zenith yet and keeps on developing. It’ll be interesting to see how far it reaches next, because with this wildly varied new album it has won itself a pile of possible directions in which to keep experimenting boldly and shrewdly, and to keep honing its craft.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Soundtrack To My Last Day
2. Pray For Fire
3. A Return To The Earth Below
4. Imperfect Divinity
5. The Adorned Fathomless Creation
6. To The Sea
7. The Colors of Grace
8. I Mourn These Yellow Leaves
9. September (Those Who Come Before)
10. Total Failure Apparatus
11. The Red Flower
12. Wolf Moon (orig. Type O Negative)
Lineup:
Cammie Gilbert – vocals
Jessie Santos – guitar, backing vocals
Alexander Lucian – guitar, backing vocals
Semir Ozerkan – bass
Dobber – drums, piano, synthesizers
Mat Aleman – keyboards
