Style: Death/Traditional (mixed vocals)
Review by: Evan
Country: Italy
Release date: January 29th, 2021
Normally, I take the liberty of sampling from an album before choosing to review it. However, this album was labeled prog death (the indisputably greatest subgenre), had a beautiful cover, and was mixed by Dan Swano. Seems cool right? Well, the best I can say is I will not retract my compliment of the album cover.
Before ragging on this too hard, it would be prudent to discuss genres. The band, in interviews, claims to be playing some form of progressive gothic death/doom. I hear the gothic and some of the doom, but not all too much of the death besides the harsh vocals. In fact, the record overall ends up sounding much more like standard progressive metal than anything else. It is easy to hear at least as much Dream Theater as Edge of Sanity. Choosing to play a more melodic style of music is not inherently a bad thing. However, here it is clearly detrimental.
The largest issue with this record is that its dynamics are not nearly convincing enough. The song structures are very akin to Opeth or Edge of Sanity, but the riffs and music in general are never heavy enough to leverage that type of writing. Whenever the harsh vocals come in, the music underneath hardly changes, and the few death metal riffs that do exist on the album are rather boring. This is a shame because many of the clean sections are rather pretty and sometimes even fairly catchy, though maybe a tad repetitive. These minimizations of dynamics, especially in the riffing, renders the record far less varied than it conceivably could have been. And to further this point, many of the shorter songs sounded rather similar.
But it would be a mistake to completely dismiss Oceana’s work here. While the guitar work is not extremely interesting, there are a lot of solid melodies, and the clean vocal layering helps build some of these melodies into some very beautiful and catchy sections. Moreover, the mix and production further help achieve this aim. But while I was enraptured by sections on the album, and actually quite enjoyed its longest track, the sameness permeating throughout and the really boring heavier sections made the album as a whole somewhat dull.
Ultimately, while I found Oceana’s focus on melody opposes their song-writing goals, I could conceivably see someone who is far more interested in a traditional style of prog metal enjoy this record far more than I did.
Recommended tracks: Hiding Lies, Carousel, Atlantidea Suite Part 1
Recommended for fans of: Edge of Sanity, Katatonia, Dream Theater
Final verdict: 4/10
Related links: Bandcamp| Spotify | Facebook| Instagram | Metal-Archives page
Label: Time to Kill Records – Bandcamp |Website | Facebook
Oceana is:
– Massimiliano Pagliuso (vocals/bass/guitars/keyboards)
– Gianpaolo Caprino (guitars)
– Alessandro Marconcini (drums)
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