OCEANS OF SLUMBER — Aetherial (review)

OCEANS OF SLUMBER — Aetherial album cover

Album · 2013 · Progressive Metal

4.5/5 · 2013-03-29
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Usually when I kick off a review I like to make my opening just about the factual information surrounding a release. Its name, the artist, where they’re from, and what album number it is for them, or if they haven’t released anything for some time or have gone through significant line-up changes. That sort of thing. Only this time around the only honest way to kick off the review is to say one simply statement:

What a genre bender.

The album is Aetherial, the 2013 debut offering from US progressive metal act Oceans of Slumber. The album is one of those cases where the term progressive metal is both the most accurate and yet the most vague of tags to place on an album. While it definitely has plenty of moments that instantly make me say ‘that’s proggy’ it also has a lot of other stuff going into it that is identifiable as another genre. While on the outset the band seems to be in the sludge fuelled camp of progressive metal that produced Mastodon, with the extreme edged sound and semi-harsh vocals of Ronnie Allen, it quickly becomes apparent that this is just one aspect of the album’s sound, and Allen’s vocals in particular. It will move through all kinds of different metal styles including groove metal, death metal, and black metal. And that’s just the metal spectrum of things. You’ll also find jazzy stuff aplenty during Aetherial.

There is indeed so much going into the album that it’s impossible to take it all in straight away. Another thing about writing an album review is that first listen. It’s never enough to properly get a sense of what the album is all about, but it will usually give me an idea about what direction my review will go down. That sort of still happened with Aetherial, you’re reading the result right now, which to cut the long story short is the result the album gave me, breaking all my conventions for putting a review together so that when that original listen finally came to an end an hour later the only real thought I had for it was “I have to listen to this again, right now.”

And I’ve kept listening to it many times over before I could finally put this review together for it. It was obvious right from the start that the guys in Oceans of Slumber were a talented bunch that were doing more with their music than just proving how versatile they could be. Their sound may be quite chaotic with how much goes into it at any given point during the nine tracks on offer but they never sounded messy or unprofessional about it. But despite the innovation Aetherial screamed at me, it was a very difficult album to take in, and I expect that’s what will keep most coming back to it at first before they decide if they actually like what’s going on here. That’s been my experience with the album in any case. While the first impressions didn’t inspire anything remotely negative to say about the album it was only once a I had a few spins under my belt that I was really able to assess the music based on whether it was enjoyable or not.

And ultimately it is definitely enjoyable. While I can’t personally associate the term ‘masterpiece’ with the album, Aetherial is most definitely a high tier effort from a band who are evidently one to keep an eye on as Aetherial suggests that they could easily become the progressive metal act of the current decade. That’s on account of that they made the one in ten album here that does its own thing within the genre. While they’re quite capable of sounding like several established bands both in and out of progressive metal during the album, Oceans of Slumber chop and change so much between styles that it’s impossible to say that they ever rip anyone off. It’s actually as if all the biggest and best metal bands who have ever walked the Earth put their DNA into a blender and Oceans of Slumber were what came out. One minute they’re Mastodon. The next they’re Obscura. Then they’re Dream Theater. Or Pantera. Or Augury. Or...

I’m sure you get the picture. Oceans of Slumber produced one of the most eclectic works of progressive metal I’ve ever encountered here. A difficult album to appreciate, but one that pays off in the end so long as you have a bit of patience to let it sink in. An exceptional grade rating is deserved.

87/100

(Originally written for Heavy Metal Haven (http://metaltube.freeforums.org/oceans-of-slumber-aetherial-t2847.html))