On Friday, September 4, 2020, Houston-based prog-metal ambassadors Oceans of Slumber will release a new, self-titled album on New Century Records. It’s the band’s fourth album with vocalist Cammie Gilbert and the first to include new members Mat V. Aleman (keyboard), Semir Ozerkan (bass, vocals), Jessi Santos (guitar), and Alexander Lucian (guitar). While Gilbert and drummer Dobber Beverly are certainly the band’s “creative core,” in interview after interview, they are quick to give full credit to their new bandmates for facilitating the evolution of the group’s sound, and not surprisingly, the album and all the players involved are already receiving tons of well-deserved praise on blogs and other digital platforms dedicated to metal in all of its many guises. What follows comes from my vantage point as a composer, a writer, and a longtime fan of the band who is still relatively new to metal. There’s so much history to this music, and innumerable bands I have yet to listen to. That said, I sincerely hope the metalheads out there will appreciate the spirit with which this was written.
Oceans of Slumber appeared on my radar in the summer of 2016 when I was trolling the Internet searching for Houston bands to write about for the first issue of an upscale lifestyle magazine called Houston CityBook. I had recently self-published a book-length collection of in-depth interviews with 37 female jazz musicians titled Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz, and when I came across a brief article about Oceans of Slumber and their lead vocalist, Cammie Gilbert, I welcomed the opportunity to write about a supremely talented Black woman in what is stereotypically perceived as a very white, very male genre of music. You might think it incongruous to pitch a prog-metal band to a magazine filled with ads for plastic surgeons and luxury real estate agents, but the editor genuinely wanted to cover the breadth of Houston’s culture, which is way more diverse and forward-thinking than many folks outside of Texas may realize.
I checked out the band’s video for the title track of their 2016 album, Winter, and immediately knew I was hearing something special. But while that particular song is a great “way in” for anyone new to and unfamiliar with the varied and often extreme subgenres of metal, Oceans of Slumber’s musical vision, like many other prog-metal bands, is expansive, and completely uncompromising. Gilbert has said of Oceans of Slumber’s music: “We blend things people aren’t used to hearing blended in such an authentic way.” [2] That word “authentic” is key for me; it’s the opposite of contrivance and synonymous with soul. Speaking of soul, Dobber Beverly, the band’s founder, drummer, composer, and producer, has acknowledged the influence of 1970s American soul and “Finnish melodic metal” on the band’s songwriting, and Gilbert is the bridge between these two musical sources, conveying both vulnerability and strength, a deceptively calm eye within the band’s musical maelstrom.
I remember trying to explain what prog-metal was to my editors and struggling for points of reference while trying hard not to resort to clichés. (In that first article I wrote, “So-called ‘prog-metal’ is heavier than heavy metal: complex, visceral, and really, really loud.” [3]) The late great music writer and critic Robert Palmer was wary of what he called “hyphenated rock,” believing that rock and roll at its most compelling was when it walked the proverbial tightrope “between musical conservatism and innovation.” [4] But he also sang the praises of Led Zeppelin, whose bold blend of blues, psychedelia, British and Celtic folk music, Indian and North African tunings and instrumentation, and James Brown-inspired funk certainly foreshadows the exploratory spirit of prog-metal. (Oceans of Slumber’s first album with Gilbert, Blue, includes a cover of Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.”)
So how to describe prog-metal? I would begin with its instrumentation, seven-string guitars and basses drop-tuned [5] to expand the range of low and high notes available to the player and provide the music’s orchestral voicings. Blast-beats, 16th or 32nd note patterns, divided between some combination of the kick, snare, and cymbals played at blisteringly fast tempos are another essential musical component in metal, [6] and are used to great effect in some of the band’s slower songs. (Check out the ballad “No Color, No Light” from The Banished Heart, Gilbert’s heartbreaking duet with Evergrey’s Tom S. Englund.) And then there are guttural vocals, a sort of hellish style of expressionist sprechstimme [7] that provides a dramatic counterpoint to Gilbert’s singing. [8] (The forementioned song “Winter” includes this style of singing.)
Extended, through-composed, and otherwise hybrid song forms are also used frequently in prog-metal. As in classical music, several songs on Oceans of Slumber eschew traditional pop song verse, bridge, chorus, repeat structure and instead consist of several contrasting movements, with surprising shifts in mood, tempos, meters, key, and Gilbert’s vocal delivery. The album’s jaw-dropping second track, “Pray for Fire,” its title evoking James Baldwin’s 1963 essay collection The Fire Next Time, his famous indictment of segregation and the oppressive nature of Christianity, is a great example of a through-composed song form created for compositional effect, as opposed to an empty display of technique. And the entire album’s sequence is similarly balanced, with two keyboard-based instrumentals, “Imperfect Divinity” and “Momentaria (September),” each a pool of calm and repose, preparing the listener for the next chapter in their sonic journey.
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Rock without its transgressive nature is like art without imagination, but we live in a fearful culture where the ecstatic and cathartic experience metal offers its listeners is mistaken for malevolence. It should be noted that the metal community is beginning to address the undercurrents of sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism that have plagued the music. [9]
Last spring, in the wake of what seemed to be an unending series of senseless, unjustifiable killings of people of color at the hands of police and self-appointed militia, Oceans of Slumber threw down the gauntlet with a video of their searing cover of the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit.” Composed in 1937 by Abel Meeropol, a white, Jewish, politically progressive schoolteacher, [10] and made famous by the jazz singer Billie Holiday, the song’s lyrics describe, in graphic, metaphorical detail, the lynching of Black people in the South:
“Southern trees bearing strange fruit,Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees . . .”
Holiday debuted the song in 1939 at Café Society in New York’s Greenwich Village, the first racially integrated club in the city, [11] and would continue to sing it throughout her career.
Originally scheduled to drop in February, a.k.a. Black History Month, Oceans of Slumber’s version was released on May 8, 2020. It was a rare, though not unheard of moment of explicit, political protest in metal, a genre that continues to be demonized by America’s hypocritical, infantile, and anti-intellectual religious right. Sadly, later that month, as a result of bystander video, the world witnessed the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man and former Houstonian, by a white, Minneapolis police officer with 18 internal affairs complaints against him.
At the time of this writing, in the wake of a six-month-long pandemic likely to continue until who knows when, it’s clear we are all in mourning, for the deaths of friends, family, and colleagues as well as good people we never met. We are mourning the loss of civility, of intelligent discourse, of a respect for intellect and creativity. We are mourning the murder of innocent people of color at the hands of police and self-anointed militia. To paraphrase a musician friend of mine, this is some Weimar-era shit we’re living now, and nobody really knows how it’s going to play out.
The lyrics to the album’s sixth track, “To the Sea (A Tolling of the Bells),” describes the strong pull mourning has upon the living:
“The ground, it holds you inAn ocean of slumber,
Forever you’ll sleep,
But I’m there too, dreading
The longing of those days gone by . . .”
But it’s the song’s closing refrain that resonates, as Gilbert sings over Beverly’s smooth, shuffle groove, “Let me go . . . Let me go into the sea . . .” Meaning, let me somehow get past this grief and move on. Let me try once again to live.
So, this may sound naïve as hell, but I actually believe music can pull you out of that 3 a.m. tunnel of despair, heal the mind, body and spirit, and provide the strength necessary to move forward, and to live. This is actually a recurring theme in Oceans of Slumber’s repertoire, from Winter to 2018’s The Banished Heart to their new, self-titled masterpiece. The band’s commitment to dealing head-on with life’s most difficult questions, in a musical language so sophisticated, dynamic, and visceral, is a major reason why the band connects so strongly with its fans, both metalheads and people like myself who are relatively new to metal, and why the new album is, to my ears, both timely and timeless.
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1 comment:
Reading this and the author's take on the deep diving that in my opinion every artist must thrive for is the only true reason to make art and music , I hail this band and may they continue to dig.
Well done chris!
David Mcgee
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