OCEANS OF SLUMBER – Where Gods Fear To Speak

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7.0

• Band:
  OCEANS OF SLUMBER
• Duration: 00:56:26
• Available from: 09/13/2024
• Label:

• Season Of Mist

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Oceans Of Slumber's career has been through tough and potentially devastating times, yet the American band has always recovered, even in a fairly short time, and has relaunched itself as best it could. If the 2020 self-titled album had been a thunderous restart, after the abandonment of the entire line-up gravitating around the creative duo Cammie and Dobber Beverly following “The Banished Heart”, “Starlight And Ash” had distinguished itself as a disconcerting chapter in the band's discography: a rosary of soft songs, metallic only up to a certain point, a distillate of melancholic and calm emotionality that relegated to marginal roles the bursting heaviness of the guitars, the prog influences and all the baggage of roaring and typically American modern metal that had shaped the identity of Oceans Of Slumber until then.
An artistically astonishing album, which after some initial perplexity dictated by the not at all pressing timing and the lack of immediacy of its contents, revealed itself as something touching, powerful in its fragility and very profound in the way it managed to communicate a complex emotionality through an original combination of southern rock, blues, soul, crooning.
A turning point that seems to have somewhat disoriented the record company, in that case Century Media, causing several misunderstandings between the parties and an inevitable separation at that point. Here then is the group under a new label, the equally important Season Of Mist, and a decisive return to a heavy and thunderous dimension with this “Where Gods Fear To Speak”, in line with what was recorded up to the album of the same name.
As has already happened in the past, the density of the contents and the complexity of the structures and arrangements is remarkable, so much so that initially – and it is not at all a novelty with the material of the Beverlys – one remains confused for a moment, because so much music comes at you, with strong stylistic and emotional ambivalences, and it is not so easy to understand what the group intends to express. In fact, the prog animosity of the band rises forcefully, starting to weave hard and whirling guitar textures, supported by equally impetuous and articulated rhythms. This happens right from the effective title-track, bringing us back in the groove of “The Banished Heart” and “Oceans Of Slumber”, with the alternation of luciferian power, majestic arias, acrobatic gothic metal and bursts of pure brutality.
The bouncing between a sinuous progressive gothic metal, full of grace and sweetly melancholic atmospheres, and grim passages clearly death metal, with the growl vigorously dirtying the instrumental tangle, remains a focal point for Oceans Of Slumber, even if in our opinion these contrasts are not always the best, within the individual tracks.
Despite the presence of some notable guests – Mikael Stanne of Dark Tranquillity for “Run From The Light” and Fernando Ribeiro of Moonspell for “Prayer” – and even Cammie’s own forays into similar vocals, things work better when the singer’s clean, flexible vocals take center stage. The growl interludes often seem excessive, overloaded in tone, while the main female voice handles both candid, delicate atmospheres and the more whimsical metallic assaults and throbbing rhythms very well.
That said, the songwriting is also on a good level this time, perhaps with a few less peaks than in other occasions, and the feeling of being in the presence of compositions, so to speak, more 'conservative' than in their other albums. There is no lack of variety and you don't have the feeling of an autopilot on, this certainly isn't the case, but there are fewer occasions in which they make us experience new suggestions.
The occasions in which the group's work is less 'maximalist', it flies a little lower and remains on fairly calm registers stand out: the sweet effusions of “Wish” and “The Given Dream” for example, while underlining that in the songs with a more sumptuous, opulent cut and with many changes of tempo and atmosphere, Oceans Of Slumber continue to do their job with full merit. Only they do it with a slightly less brilliance than other times, or perhaps, simply, they use the same expedients without adding anything new.
For fans of the band, “When Gods Fear To Speak” will still be an album to be assimilated with satisfaction, appreciating the characteristic reassurances that have made the Texans a name of a certain importance in the current American metal scene.