vote
5.5
- Band:
OCEAN - Duration: 00:32:42
- Available from: 08/30/2024
- Label:
-
Sumerian Records
Streaming not yet available
Excluding the difficult years and the more general events related to the Covid-19 pandemic regarding their presence on stage and the publication of music, Oceano is a band that has always been very attentive to the response of its audience and the regularity of its live and studio activities.
Singer and helmsman Adam Warren has always been able to take the band around the world through a tight concert presence accompanied by the release of albums and singles for very important labels, first Earache and later Sumerian Records, despite dozens of lineup changes and generally adverse criticism of the band's discography – with the exception of the always appreciated debut “Depths”.
Fifteen years after the release of this latest work, the band is preparing to publish its sixth and new full-length album entitled “Living Chaos”, and it does so by anticipating the release of the album with a canonical double of singles capable of collecting an excellent number of plays on the various streaming platforms.
It can be said that the success of this promotional process is actually a habit for the Chicago band, whose following has always been rather faithful and positive to the related album releases despite the aforementioned reticence on the part of a certain criticism, with which we actually find ourselves reluctantly aligned – while remaining aware of the enormous amount of work that lies behind this type of production.
With the exception of the fifth track “Wounds Never Healed” and the closing track “Broken Curse”, the considerations made for almost every Oceano album can be replicated for almost the entirety of “Living Chaos”.
We are faced with a half-hour of running time spread over eight tracks, plus a very technical and rhythmically tight deathcore interlude, but practically devoid of real riffs, where the guitars and bass simply propose themselves as support for double bass drum and snare patterns constantly overwhelmed by Warren's thunderous voice, rather than engaging in any melodic development. The latter is entrusted, in a perhaps slightly awkward and naive manner, to several layers of synthesizers and highly effected guitars, sometimes even played clean. Such layers have always been used by the band as a background element and compositional enrichment rather than as the main voice, while in fact retaining the only melodic elements found within the songs – otherwise often reducible to mere rhythmic and numerical sequences.
The formula is definitely what Oceano fans can expect, but in the two pieces mentioned above they will instead encounter some variations on the theme described: the first is characterized by the rather unusual insertion of synth-pop or new wave-flavored arpeggiators and by arrangements closer to rock music in a broad sense, while the second presents structures similar to a more progressive approach to extreme metal. However, we must admit that both episodes seem to us to be poorly accomplished, even if we appreciate an evident desire to break out of a basic scheme that the band itself could in a certain sense be tired of replicating from a compositional point of view. The songwriting therefore remains in our opinion quite lacking in interesting ideas despite the attempts mentioned about a certain desire for change and, perhaps, to update the proposal.
The first album “Depths” remains in summary once again unsurpassed in terms of compositional quality compared to the subsequent episodes of Oceano's discography; “Living Chaos” is unfortunately no exception to the series of albums produced which, in the opinion of the writer, does not bring added value to the deathcore proposed by our guys and above all does not find in the relative episodes its own independence compared to the debut.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM