Review THE OCEAN COLLECTIVE: „Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic“

Band photo credit: Jo Fischer

Hello SKULL NEWS!

Now’s the time for the most important review of the year! I’ve said time and time again how fond of the ocean I am (and by that I actually mean the sea). It comes as no surprise that one of my all-time favorite bands is THE OCEAN COLLECTIVE from Germany. If I were to make it simple, I’d say they’re playing post-metal/progressive sludge, but their influences are many.

The band was founded in 2001 by guitarist/lyricist/composer Robin Staps, and they’re about to release their 9^th full-length on September 25^th, entitled “Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic”, through PELAGIC RECORDS, the band’s own label and METAL BLADE RECORDS. It is the direct continuation of their previous effort, “Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic”, released in 2018.

Weird names for those who skipped geology class at school, those two albums are meant to be listened to as a double album, spanning all the periods of the Phanerozoic Eon, the geologic time corresponding to the advent of life in many forms, starting from the Cambrian (541 million years ago) to the current Holocene, which started approximately 11,700 years ago. The previous album spanned the periods from aforementioned Cambrian up to the end of the Permian (252 million years ago). The new record is subdivided into two periods, the Mesozoic, which is most commonly known as the age of dinosaurs, and the Cenozoic, the age of mammals. The planet’s history is laden with extinction events, which helped scientists divide geologic eons the way they are described. The music follows these events through both life and death, with a focus on the despair mirroring our environmental crisis that may lead up to our own extinction event.

The entire Phanerozoic experience is set in the middle of THE OCEAN’s 2007 release “Precambrian” (which is the geologic eon right before the Phanerozoic) and the 2010 double album “Anthropocentric / Heliocentric”, which focused more on the struggles between modern science, evolution, the human condition and religion, aided with literary and philosophical references from the United-Kingdom and Germany (like Friedrich Nietzsche, David Hume, Lord Byron and Charles Darwin).

With all these albums linked together, you will have quite a lot to listen to if you’re not yet familiar with the band. And there’s four more albums and a few other songs here and there if you want to check their whole discography. By the way, “Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic” does not limit itself to this chain of albums, as this quite varied composition spans influences from the band’s whole career and beyond.

Before going deeper into the new album, please have a listen to the first single released early in July, “Jurassic | Cretaceous”, a 13 minute-long piece that exemplifies perfectly all what Robin and his friends have been capable of doing these past 20 years:

And if you’re interested in the drummer Paul Seidel’s technical proficiency, I also invite you to check his drum playthrough of the song. His performance, hinting at extreme metal as well (which can also be heard on the track „Pleistocene„), reminds us that this guy also plays in extreme metal bands like NIGHTMARER and formerly WAR FROM A HARLOTS MOUTH:

Enjoy as well the artwork of the album, which shows a stony rendition of what seems to be the Earth and the Moon, dried up. The vinyls will have different sheets which you may interchangeably position to give the cover the appearance you like most, in a similar way to what they made with the “Phanerozoic I” trifold vinyls.

“Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic” track list:

1. Triassic
2. Jurassic | Cretaceous
3. Palaeocene
4. Eocene
5. Oligocene
6. Miocene | Pliocene
7. Pleistocene
8. Holocene (trifold version exclusive track)

Now onto the actual review. I will do my best to talk about the music and the lyrics without spoiling the fun of the first listening experience you’ll get upon the release of the album. I hope this will get you into pre-ordering this beast (links at the end of the article). I won’t divulge any lyrics to yet unreleased songs, but will try to tell what they got me thinking, and a potential meaning that I’ve built up from them. Of course, this is subjective, and my experience could be different than yours when you’ll be able to listen to the album.

So, the first half, “Cenozoic”, is made of the two longest tracks, and corresponds to the era of dinosaurs. The Triassic period has its own track while Jurassic and Cretaceous have merged to form the longest track of the album that you’ve had the chance to listen to already.

1. Triassic

The Triassic period started 251 million years ago and ended 201 million years ago. The song quietly takes you this period marked by its scorching heat with clean guitars and synths overlapping, until the chorus kicks in, in which singer Loïc Rossetti graces us with soft, distant clean vocals that remind me of the band CYNIC. Going back to “Precambrian”, it also feels similar to clean vocals you can hear at the end of the song “Ectasian” there (which is a good thing of course).

The lyrics of „Triassic“ seem to emphasize the idea of otherness, coupled with loneliness. After the Permian-Triassic extinction event, called “The Great Dying” (which is the topic of the last song off of the first part of “Phanerozoic”), in which more than 96% of marine species disappeared along with about 70% of terrestrial species (that makes 86% of all life), the Earth was off to a fresh start. The spark of life that survived carries the flame of the living in this barren land in which all seems dead. The Triassic was quite desertic, and while lyrics refer to this weather, guitar parts also have a kind of oriental vibe, and you can hear here and there percussions that will remind you of Northern African instruments.

2. Jurassic | Cretaceous

Here comes the giant of the album, and the second part of the Mesozoic half of the disc. The Jurassic started were the Triassic left off, around 201 million years ago, and gave place to the Cretaceous 145 million years ago until the meteor struck 66 million years ago. The first half of the song is calmer than the second, with doom/sludge oriented guitars and mainly clean vocals. The lyrics of the whole song deal with the issue of climate change, using the image of the extinction of the dinosaurs as a mirror of our own impending destruction.

The second half of the song starts when Jonas Renkse, from KATATONIA, sings his angelic vocals over Peter Voigtmann’s ethereal synths. “The world we know will go down in flames”. As we know, it’s our fault, human greed has lain for decades the soil for our own demise. “We are just like reptiles giant rulers of the world, within the blink of an eye, wiped off the face of the Earth”: The comparison between dinosaurs and us is easy to make. We are the apex predators today, as the greater carnivorous dinosaurs were in their time, and yet they quickly disappeared. We’ll only remain as fossils, just like them, as we are caught in the same cycle of destruction. After the chorus, the tempo switches on and off to sections of hyper fats blast beats and frenetic double pedal, which help us get the idea of extreme danger which extinction represents. The remainder of the lyrics continue to focus on the scorching fires and the debris. It calls to mind an earlier song from the album “Anthropocentric”: “She Was the Universe”, which is an adaptation of Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness”, written after the year without a summer, in 1816, in which the Tambora volcano had erupted and turned the world to Darkness, famine, coldness and despair for months. The lyrical content and images feel similar between both songs. Clocking at more than 13 minutes, this second song from “Phanerozoic II” shows very well all the variety of talents that the musicians have mastered.

Now that the Mesozoic period is finished, let’s dive into the Cenozoic. No more reptiles: this is the advent of mammals. The second part of the album has 4 songs (5 if you get the limited edition), from the Palaeocene period up to the Pleistocene (or the Holocene in the limited edition, but believe me, you don’t want this album without this last song). In this case, as there are more songs, they are shorter than on the first half of the album, several of them being around 4 minutes long.

3. Palaeocene

The Paleocene starts 66 million years ago and ends ten million years later. The song is a 4 minute long punch in your face featuring the voice of Tomas Liljedahl, if I’m not mistaken (previously known as Tomas Hallbom), from the Swedish bands BREACH and THE OLD WIND. Tomas used to be THE OCEAN’s singer in their early days; you can hear him sing on the albums “Fluxion” and “Aeolian”. After he officially left the band, he kept guesting on several tracks throughout the band’s discography. He was missed on the first part of “Phanerozoic”, but now he’s back on duty here and on another song, which we’ll discuss later.

The song reminds me both of the aggressiveness found on the first part of the “Precambrian” album, and its main riff plunges you into the unknown in the same way as the title song from the band’s first release, “Fogdiver”. I get the exact same feeling on those two songs, with added vocals on “Palaeocene”. While the song felt, on first listen, rather straightforward, it will manage to catch you off guard in-between sections. The vocals intertwine between Tomas and Loïc, and the lyrics seem to invite you to move forward from the past, in this case, the nothingness left behind by the bones of dinosaurs. At the same time, they let you believe that in any case, even if you need to move forward, you’re left in loss and despair.

Check out „Fogdiver„:

4. Eocene & 5. Oligocene

The Eocene started 56 million year sago and ended 34 million years ago, and was followed by the Oligocene, which lasted until 23 million years ago. These two songs have a huge “Heliocentric” feel to them. Clean guitars, on a slow rhythm, with exclusively soft and aerial clean vocals. “Eocene” could be the ballad of the album. The guitar intro and overall guitar sound reminds me of AMENRA’s “A Solitary Reign” on their “Mass VI” album. The lyrics portray a sense of abandonment. It is about two entities drifting apart. Maybe it’s humans, having lived off the Earth’s resources forever without a second thought, and the Earth, in its decayed state after extinction and desertification. As the previous album, we get that one of the main topics is the ecological and meteorological crisis in which we’re digging in. It may be a bias of myself to think a lot along those lines while listening and reading the lyrics, but it does seem relevant to point this overarching theme again.

“Oligocene” is an instrumental showcasing the synths and keys of the album. The sound feels like synthwave from another time. That piece is very calming, the calm before the storm, before some heavier riffs coming next!

6. Miocene | Pliocene

The next song puts two periods together: the Miocene and the Pliocene. The first started 23 million years ago and ended 5 million years ago, and the second followed and ended 2,5 million years ago. As mammals further evolved, those periods saw the evolution of different species of primates, the first apes which would eventually lead to Homo sapiens, like Toumai and Orrorin.

The song starts with buzzing drones and synths, directly following the synths from “Oligocene”, and then alternates between heavier and calmer moments. It is balanced by Loïc’s vocals, who sings cleans on heavier sections and growls on the quieter ones. The lyrics are about the rise of apes, and the spark of intelligence that asks them to develop new ways to survive. The weaker and less smart apes will die and leave room to the other. Yet, eventually, all will disappear, and go back to the cycle of the cosmic process, as mentioned already in “Cambrian II: Eternal Recurrence” on “Phanerozoic I”. That song referred to Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Recurrence, which portray the universe as an inescapable circle in which events occur and reoccur again, similarly to the cycles of mass extinction and rebirth the planet has lived through (check “The Greatest Weight” on Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science”, if you’re interested).

7. Pleistocene

This is the last song of the regular version of the album, but I will talk as well about the exclusive song later. The Pleistocene started 2,5 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago. During this period apes and the first humans became more intelligent and more complex beings.

The songs starts with a slow martial rhythm, introduced by synths and bass, on which Loïc adds clean melancholic vocals. The song has two major shifts. First, after the calmer introduction, the band goes into the sludge register for which it’s known, with heavy downtuned guitars and screamed vocals. The lyrics focus on negative emotions and death. Or, how the human intellect became to be interested in things darker. I feel that it describes the moment where something went wrong and people have switched from being good to being evil. In Greek myth, we’ve been given the Promethean fire, we became smarter, but as it may have been seen as a gift from the gods, maybe it is simply the curse of chaos touching us. And thus, the apex predator is thrown into this chaos with no hope of escape.
Then, on the last third of the song, chaos ensues. Drums furiously blast beat your ears to Hell, along with guitars tremoloing into black metal territory. Tomas guests again on this section, with high-pitched screeching vocals, which add up to the black metal sound of this song. This last part left me speechless, because of its poignant energy, and the pain I could feel through the notes playing at extreme speed. After a slight loss of breath, you may be able to listen to the real last song.

EDIT: While many thought it was Tomas singing on that black metal part, now that the album’s been out for two weeks, many discussions have erupted about it, and it would seem that it was Loic all along!

8. Holocene (trifold version exclusive track)

This song is like the final secret boss in some video games. You need to get the trifold limited edition to get this song. I believe you need it to have the complete „Phanerozoic“ experience. The Holocene period is the current one in which we’re living, that started 11,700 years ago.
The song is a clean and quiet closure to the album, with light guitars, violins and synths, and clean vocals that may remind you of the song „For He That Wavereth…“ off of „Anthropocentric„.

The lyrics are a mixture of a reference to the last ice age that started the Holocene and some of the lyrics from the first two songs of the album. They hint at the Holocene extinction humanity has brought up, and that it may soon be too late (if it isn’t already) to make things better. People need to react and do something but seem overall unwilling to, and thus the disaster will come.
The song ends on a specific bass line that I’m sure I’ve heard somewhere else in a THE OCEAN song, I just can’t pinpoint which one. I may be wrong, but if you find something when the album gets released, don’t hesitate to tell me.

Thus ends my review. The new THE OCEAN album is a massive experience, that goes into several genres at once, all the while keeping the basics the band is know for. It gives even more space to synths, has, as usual, many differents instruments playing above the rest, and is, associated with the first part of the „Phanerozoic“ double album, one of the greatest things I’ve heard in a while.
It definitely sounds like THE OCEAN, but keeps surprising you anyway. Fans of the band like myself will most certainly be pleased, and I invite people who haven’t discovered them yet to dive into their discography, a sea of sounds full of marvels. It is a truly forward-thinking band, pushing the boundaries of metal music and always trying to get out of its comfort zone.
The themes explored throughout the band’s discography have alway dealt with the sea, literature, philosophy, and the modern age. „Phanerozoic“ feels like it was made as a result of our dire times, and is a perfect example of music fighting the good fight. Excellent music aware of the world’s problems, helping listeners to think as well abotu the status of the world. I believe that art in any form will be the key to succeed into changing the world into something better. I also think that art can help people notice the wrongs of our ways, and howto revert to a more healthy and safe way of living and evolving.
For all that, and all what THE OCEAN has ever done, I’m thankful. It fills me with joy that such a band exists, and every release changes me a little or helps me think and win the struggles of our age.

THE OCEAN is:

Robin Staps: Guitars
Loïc Rossetti: Vocals
Paul Seidel: Drums
Mattias Hagerstrand: Bass
David Ramis Åhfeldt: Guitars
Peter Voigtmann: Synths

And always many guests, like Jonas Renkse of KATATONIA and Tomas Liljedahl of BURST/THE OLD WIND, which is why the band call themselves a „collective“. Core members and friends collaborating on something great together.

I hope that this long text will get you into listening to this band. the new album „Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic will be out on September 25^th through METAL BLADE RECORDS and PELAGIC RECORDS (for vinyls). Check the following links to follow the band and labels on social media and to pre-order the album.

THE OCEAN on Facebook
THE OCEAN on Spotify
THE OCEAN’s METAL BLADE RECORDS website
PELAGIC RECORDS website
PELAGIC RECORDS on Facebook
PELAGIC RECORDS on YouTube
METAL BLADE RECORDS website
METAL BLADE RECORDS on Facebook
METAL BLADE RECORDS on YouTube

That’s probably my last article for the month, as I have a lot of other work stacking up for the rest of the summer. I hope you enjoyed it, and see you later on SKULL NEWS!

-Hakim