"Full of Volcanoes and Grasslands!"
Blasting out extreme and experimental sounds is a tough challenge especially for Robin Staps' The Ocean Collective who has members from Converge, Cave In, War From A Harlots Mouth, and even has performers from the Berlin Philharmonic, doing the orchestral work. That's a lot of responsibility for a dude to handle and absolute props for his previous efforts and this 2007 opus, Precambrian.
Giving a main concept to the natural land of mother Earth millions of years ago and having music with music to heavily back up the concept is just plain effective as Hadean can be imagined as a pool of lava flowing and flooding the hostile planet. This sense of evil exists only for almost a half hour but the execution of harsh progressive metal, hardcore punk, and sludge metal makes every listen of the first disc enjoyable until the end blast where it's time to get introduced to atmosphere, oxygen, and life.
Disc 2 is where Staps' mastery exists as the abrasive sounds of disc one and their previous album, Aeolian mix with the atmospheric characteristics of their first album Fluxion. Having the NeuroIsis touch but having a sound all their own flooded by sequentially proper background effects of unconventional instruments (glockenspiel say much?). In support of vocalists like Nate Newton, Dwid Hellion, Matt Beels, Nico Webers, the awesome Meta giving agony and elegence to the philosphical lyrics of the likes of Nietzsche and Trakl. Heck Kevin Spacey appears but as a audio rip from The Life of David Gale (still great though). All of these sounds processing impressively through songs like Ectasian and the epic Rhyacian is nothing but mind blowing.
Precambrian is over ambitious but when all else misses the mark for success, The Ocean hits it dead on like a big bang, excuse my Earth history joke.
10/10
Giving a main concept to the natural land of mother Earth millions of years ago and having music with music to heavily back up the concept is just plain effective as Hadean can be imagined as a pool of lava flowing and flooding the hostile planet. This sense of evil exists only for almost a half hour but the execution of harsh progressive metal, hardcore punk, and sludge metal makes every listen of the first disc enjoyable until the end blast where it's time to get introduced to atmosphere, oxygen, and life.
Disc 2 is where Staps' mastery exists as the abrasive sounds of disc one and their previous album, Aeolian mix with the atmospheric characteristics of their first album Fluxion. Having the NeuroIsis touch but having a sound all their own flooded by sequentially proper background effects of unconventional instruments (glockenspiel say much?). In support of vocalists like Nate Newton, Dwid Hellion, Matt Beels, Nico Webers, the awesome Meta giving agony and elegence to the philosphical lyrics of the likes of Nietzsche and Trakl. Heck Kevin Spacey appears but as a audio rip from The Life of David Gale (still great though). All of these sounds processing impressively through songs like Ectasian and the epic Rhyacian is nothing but mind blowing.
Precambrian is over ambitious but when all else misses the mark for success, The Ocean hits it dead on like a big bang, excuse my Earth history joke.
10/10
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