How deep is The Ocean? Progressive/ Post/ Sludge Metal or Rock, the music invokes geologic time periods and continental shift.
The German band is based in Berlin. They powered up and started lumbering off around the turn of the century and have had at least forty musicians in that time (Ocean Collective is the alternative handle).
Onstage at Galatos tonight, we have Robin Staps, founder and guitarist, along with Loic Rosetti voice, Paul Seidel drums, David Ramis Ahfeldt guitar, and Matthias Hagerstrand on bass.
Preboreal and Boreal have quiet meditative beginnings with complex structured symphonic movements, The build is slow and the Metal rises and fires up like an industrial furnace. Incantatory vocals and charged guitars make for Eurocentric drone music.
Sea of Reeds and the heavy machinery guitar tone sounds like the electric sitar, or dho, that I encountered last year at a Creative Jazz Club concert last year with sitar maestro Purbayan Chatterjee. Not a modified guitar, and his own invention.
The song is melodic, and the slow passages dominate.
Bathyalpelagic III: Disequilibrated is an epic from their highly regarded Pelagial album. A steady electronic rhythm riff lumbers along with a melodic tenor vocal. The music peaks in bursts but maintains a subterranean presence.
At the halfway mark the inspiration rises, and the music is driven up and over the wall of combat.
Even more combative is Oligocene. Again, a slow drone to build. There are brief violent detonations before diving back into the depths. They can get to sound as fraught and terrifying as the Wax Chattels.
The band is highly regarded inside the diverse and complex Metal and Progressive Rock scene of Europe.
Lyrics contain anti-Christian sentiments which attracts some flak in their direction. I don’t know if that puts them on the side of progressive Liberals or Conservative Right.
They explore Nietzschean ideas, amalgamated with Tarkovsky-inspired soundscapes.
Pull Down the Sun play just prior to the headliners.
A trio from Whanganui, Koert Wegman guitar, Jason Healey guitar and Stefan Bourke drums.
The music is driven by the excellent drummer and the guitarists form up into a meshed wall of sound.
There are bass guitar tones, which I am told come from backing tracks and do not come from the kick drums.
Some of the sounds are archly gothic.
At times it is a progression of the motorcycle sound of the early Sixties like Link Wray or Davie Allen. Incidentally Wray was producing that ground-breaking music, all the way from Rumble (1958) to his death in 2005.
Of Valleys and Mountains is the last song they play. A momentous pressure wave of sound which doesn’t peak. It just stays relentless.
The Ocean respond to the chants of Fuck Yeah! from the predominantly bearded male audience. They power up again through Pleistocene and Subatlantic.
One of those two Cambrian songs and the guitars strafe the room with crossfire artillery energy. It has a curiously calming effect on the audience.
A couple of times Rosetti stage dives and gets held up by the front of stage.
They build up to a big finale with Triassic. The first time I hear twanging Western style guitars being lifted on a massive rhythm engine bass and drums.
And then the smoke alarms go off, the fire engines arrive, and the show stops abruptly.
It could have been staged. Outside, I heard someone say he went to The Ocean gig 15 years ago and the same thing happened.
A better way to end than shouting release the hounds!
Rev. Orange Peel
Photography by Leonie Moreland
The Ocean
Pull Down The Sun
Helgorithms
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