THE OCEAN COLLECTIVE
"Precambrian"
Released: Nov. 27, 2007
Genre: Metal, Hardcore, Ambient

Official Site, MySpace, Wikipedia

[Multimedia note: Listen to the audio version of this review as Carl Zielinski mixes his opinions with sample clips from the CD.]

SINCE ROUGHLY 1987 (when Death released the landmark album "Scream Bloody Gore" and Mayhem unleashed "Deathcrush"), the musical style we now call “heavy metal” has been endlessly fragmented.

While early bands in the genre all had a similar style, there weren’t any particular divisions in the metal world. Since that year, the metal world has shattered. Almost every ultra-extreme variant imaginable has come and gone and come again.

With black, death, doom, thrash, "nu" metal (and their bastardized offspring) bands all spreading across the globe, the genre has faded almost entirely from the mainstream.

While this means that we may never again see a metal band as popular as Iron Maiden, it does have a positive side. Now, more than ever, bands are beginning to expand, to incorporate more and more elements into their sound.

German band The Ocean Collective (or The Ocean, as they are more commonly called) is just such a case. With their latest release, the double album “Precambrian,” they prove that a metal band can still be intelligent, cutting, and undeniably musical, even in a rap- and indie rock-dominated world.

As a whole, the album combines so many dissident elements that words can’t really do The Ocean’s sound justice. When broken up into its separate pieces, however, the true variation in the band’s sound becomes more and more apparent.

The first disk, titled “Hadean/Archaean” (all songs and disks are named after geological periods in the Earth’s history) is a mini-CD with roughly 22 minutes of music and is the more hardcore, metal-oriented disk of the two. As an added plus, the CD itself looks cool as hell.

Each song is a boiling cauldron of jagged, brutal riffs served with a heaping portion of attitude that could catapult even the most idiotic material into memorable greatness.

The second CD, “Proterozoan,” is by far the subtler disk of the two. Songs like “Rhyacian” meld seamlessly from apocalyptic guitar assaults to soft, electronic interludes and everything in between. Additionally, the expanded band on “Proterozoan” includes violins, horns, and woodwinds, opening up nearly limitless avenues of experimentation and musical intrigue.

The only detracting element, so far as I can tell anyway, is that in almost no circumstances are the vocals even slightly intelligible. Unfortunately, they aren’t even Kurt Cobain unintelligible. The Ocean’s rotating cast of vocalists use every throat-scraping trick in the book of metalcore screaming, and they do it quite well. Unfortunately, this technique is not only damaging to the vocal chords, but it can also sound utterly atrocious.

While I can appreciate vocals that can be downright disgusting (Ken Owen, Jeff Walker, and Bill Steer’s work in the band Carcass, for instance), these are not without their own sick charm. The Ocean, by simply having so many separate, disparate voices, fail to attach the listener to any one band member, thus making each new track utterly unfamiliar and menacing.

However, even vocal oddities can’t keep The Ocean from utterly destroying just about every other band in existence these days. Their willingness to piece together previously opposing elements (soft piano passages and thrash metal breakdowns, for instance) puts them head and shoulders above even the most tenacious band in the music industry today.

What The Ocean wind up creating by the end of “Precambrian” is at once alarmingly base and exceedingly pretentious; a combination of elements so bizarre and diverse that conventional logic says they should by no means work together. Fortunately, this is not the case. This is one the most unflinchingly intelligent albums I’ve heard in ages, and it’s about time.