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Ocean: Pantheon of the lesser

15/04/09 || Khlysty

As you may have gleaned from older reviews, I really, really dig doom metal, especially in its more extreme forms. Don’t get any idea that I spend my whole time stoned and lost into some mystical haze, though. Basically, I like extreme doom ‘cause it demands things from the band and from the listener. That is, the band HAS to come up with good ideas about song dynamics, melody, orchestration, vocals, the whole package, so as to make the songs worthwhile. And the listener HAS to pay attention to all the details, or else he’ll just be pounded away by the density of sound. And, I don’t know ‘bout you, but I hate just being pounded away, ok? So, yeah, I like the slow-and-low, but the bands doing this shit HAVE to give me something to hold onto, or else they can fuck right off.

Now, Portland, Maine’s Ocean – by the way, the name is incredibly mundane AND already used – is one of those doom bands that really get my attention. Why, you ask, dear reader? Well, because they do exactly the things that I said above. Even though they write really loooooong songs, they have the I.Q. to make them interesting, be it through orchestration, dynamics or both. Actually, I think that Ocean, before they started composing their music, they spent quite some time listening to both doom metal and post rock. So, they don’t go just for the hyper-dense wall-of-sound approach, but they seem to understand that they have to use strategy in arranging the information they want to disseminate with their music.

Their new record, “Panteon Of The Lesser” contains two songs, “The Beacon” and “Of The Lesser”. The two songs cover the good part of an hour, which tells you a lot about the music contained in here. To grind fans this will be torture. Even to more trad doom fans, easy listening this ain’t: this is slower that slow, lower than low music, with lotsa peaks and valleys, lotsa points where the feedback is barely harnessed, lotsa moments where the drums disappear completely, lotsa moments where the riff is almost gone, either into a squall of noise, or into near-silence. The main vocals are sandpaper screaming and they are used very sparingly, so they cannot be used as a kind of anchor. To make a long story short, this is music formed in such a way as to appear almost formless.

And here’s where Ocean’s strength lies: they use every means available to them to make their music powerful, emotionally devastating AND listenable. The bandmembers arrange their riffs in interesting and constantly shifting patterns, so the redundancy and repetition ratio is very low. They use dynamics in smart ways (sometimes almost extinguishing sound, sometimes using clean picking, sometimes accenting the melody, etc) and the songs do not seem so much played as developed through time and space. Also, in “The Beacon” they introduce a wild card in the vocal department: Yoshiko Ohara from NYC’s doom merchants Bloody Panda, whose vocals, ranging from an almost toneless drone to hysterical screaming, add a lot of emotional value to an already great song.

So, my point is that Ocean is a great doom band and “Pantheon Of The Lesser” is a great doom record. It’s heavy, it’s smart, it’s well-arranged and well-played and it’s interesting in many different ways. If one likes doom, this is a must-get.

8,5 doom-but-done-right out of 10.

Information
Released: 2008
Label: Important Records
Website: www.oceanofdoom.com
Band
Candy: guitar, vocals
JL: guitar
Reuben J. Little: bass
Eric Brackett: drums

Tracklist
01. The Beacon
02. Of The Lesser

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