The Ocean: “Truly Treacherous Tunes”

The Skinny: The German boys in The Ocean couldn’t have chosen a better name for their newest album. Anthropocentric as English majors know, basically means “regarding humans as the most important element of existence; godly animals.” That’s exactly how Luc Hess, Robin Staps, Jonathan Nido, Louis Jucker, Loic Rossetti and Julien Fehlmann come across – godly. Their timing is impeccable and the new album is so slick; all with a huge dash of intensity.

Now Anthropocentric doesn’t come out until November 9th, 2010 in North America and to be honest, I had never heard of The Ocean before, but i have already made plans to go buy myself a copy – this release is THAT GOOD.

Musically, the album feels heavier than I’d expect when looking at the cover; I first likened it to Muse’ newest disc, The Resistance but, the two words which instead came to mind when i sat down with it were dense and heavy. There is so much happening on this release that you can’t miss a single delicious second of the music. The Ocean really seem to evolve over the course of the album, the first track [also the title track] at nine minutes covers A LOT of musical ground alone. Anthropocentric is the second and/or final part in a concept series, the first of which, Heliocentric was released in April.

The Ocean manages to incorporate the vocal stylings of Mastodon, and the heaviness of Opeth, and yet remains really guitar heavy… which is quite a tempting mixture. I got from this release the impression the boys were trying to focus on the heavy songs, and man they really killed it by presenting some seriously kick-ass tunes. Beware… The Ocean is coming!  [ END ]

Genre(s): Sludge, Progressive, Metal, Experimental, Hardcore