Review Summary: Hollow music from the slowly dying prog scene.
“Let it sink in”, they might say. “This is a sprawling, spiralling, incorrigible rock-opus-
epic from the sparkling fountain of progressive{rock} thinking, untapped, yet unraveled by The Ocean where brave seas tread” — something a Sputnikmusic staff member would write. I say this album is a lot of wasted time. It is Karnivool if drained of energy, it is Porcupine Tree but replaced with often passionless singing, it is The Pineapple Thief but boring, it is not cool enough to be dad rock — it is flat. Ahh, but there are some punchy riffs. Tell that to my disappointment.
Alright, let’s cycle back. After all, the final four tracks have a wee bit of soul and potential creativity. It is when their ideas come in fullness of power and gumption but until then, the tracks are balloons filled with filler, aimless air failing to fill the balloons fully. Third party air was not a thing until the creation of this album, and yes, I realize electronic music and the ambient genre are cool. The first time I played Holocene I realized I skipped most of the album. The second time I did the same, and with more feeling due to realizing the correctness of my gut reaction. I feel little from the music, it is a fabrication of stolen ideas, things that have worked in the past, now with less effort and less instruments. There are times when it works, but it’s not worth waiting for a decent moment to finally pop out.
These days anyone can slap an album together and call it progressive. While it does take an effort to stretch out a track, it doesn’t automatically make a track good, or an epic. The label “progressive” should be used by progressive thinkers, bands that
greatly break the tired old barrier of the conventional. The sad part is that I used to expect great things under the progressive banner. It used to mean something. Bands didn’t simply give us leftovers, they did a completely new thing. Perhaps they used a formula that other bands made successful, but they did a completely original spin on it. For example, how Pagan’s Mind took notes from Queensryche’s music, and evolved onto a more cosmic, sci-fi epic scale. Indeed, such was the magnitude of the power of the progressive label. It’s 2023 and originality may be harder to find, but please, let’s not make it this hard.
What the Ocean did in Holocene is not fun, not captivatingly intriguing, or filled with more substance the deeper you fall into the rabbit hole. There’s no story here that is painted from the music notes. It’s loosely prog rock/metal, though so often void of creative juice the tracks could play alongside Falling In Reverse on the radio without anyone blinking an eye (that’s a little bit of an exaggeration overdose but I’ll leave it because I find it funny). The track Boreal is everything wrong with the album, it has potentially neat synths, and potentially neat build-up, yet nothing special happens. One forgettable, average guitar hook occurs to break the repetition, and extremely simplistic self-harmonization occurs. Was that meant to be the incredible climax? It was limp.
I’m not done nitpicking. The background guitars are often average and barely there. There’s a few decent moments, but not enough to impress, certainly. Likewise, the singing is surprisingly run of the mill. This is progressive music? The drummer is a small saving grace, he knows how to keep the rhythms forward, and the music really should be following suit. In many ways, due to the excellent drummer and spacey alt rock, the album sounds like 10 Years meets Atomship. I’m back to comparing bands again, and it’s no doubt getting confusing/tiresome. However, that’s where the music left me, thinking about its repeating cycle, as it continuously borrows ideas from other bands like a revolving door. A derivative product is one thing, but The Ocean have taken it to the very edge of mediocrity, and have barely taken a step onto the other side. They got their toes wet, but for a band with so many albums, I’d expect a more interesting sound by now. For those only now hearing about this band, this is not the place to start.
