Hell, since i’m in this aquatic mood (yeah with wales and seas and leviathans), so why not talk about The Ocean newest release “Aeolian”, The Ocean, plays a metal/hardcore hybrid, mixing different stuff, sometimes sounding closer to The Dillinger Escape Plan punk aggression, other times the more rock/metal of the likes of Mastodon, any way let’s see what the album has in store.
It all starts off with “The City in the Sea”, slow grinding start, that converts into a …. almost “stop go”, bouncy, metal sequence that goes through the music, to a more simple rock finish, uhhh that’s a nice mixture and a fine tune indeed, lets head out to “Dead Serious and Highly Professional”, punk driven song, ok and “Austerity” uhhh a almost mastodon stoner rock , although nothing especial, how about “Killing the Flies”, nice breakbeat, very similar in style with the first track, bouncy “stop go” like music, with a good clean chorus, and interesting guitar work, now we get into the more simplistic part of the album, with the narrow minded “Une Saison En Enfer” and the very cheaply made punk “Necrobabes.Com”, then we get on track with “One With the Ocean”, again with the same bouncy groove, next we have “Swoon”, very straight to your face metalcore, again “Queen of the Food-Chain” gives the best “metalcore” song on the album, combining the bouncy groove they tend to use on this album, with their more aggressive metalcore vein, and they finish the album with “Inertia” a metal/punk fusion.
So how as Aeolian survived my scrutiny, well a bit on the downside, as you can see on this review, i tend to talk more about their adventures on the realms of metal/rock than talk about the musics themselves, since they are proficient in combining different genres, complexity and diversity is not a question, the problem here is how everything fits together, and it doesn’t fit that well, even though it’s diverse they tend to use the same song structures and always or go for short punk like inspired tunes or just create 5 to 10 minute songs with long song breaks to try and build up songs, it just kills the pace, they are good with the groove oriented metal and the metalcore, but they are a little narrow minded with the punk rock thing, so overall its a good try but it’s only an average album, and as such, it’s better to buy the good ones on itunes than to buy it all on cd.
The Ocean – Swoon