Being As An Ocean – Being As An Ocean

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Let’s get this out the way right now; if you’re a regular visitor to Metal-Temple, you’re going to absolutely hate this record. There are no songs about Vikings, no blast beats and even during the harsher parts it’s easy to make out every single lyric. BEING AS AN OCEAN’s self-titled third album is an impassioned ten tracks of Post Hardcore, full of introspective angst and there’s more than a faint whiff of Emo about it too. It’s closer to FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND than TERROR and if they ever played GRASPOP they’d get eaten alive.

But, in fairness to them that doesn’t mean it’s a bad album. Nowadays it’s easy to forget that Emo wasn’t always a dirty word and there was a time when it was a perfectly credible genre of music, at least until a certain haircut and too many tight jeans ruined everything. BEING AS AN OCEAN mercifully haven’t paid much attention to anything since HOT WATER MUSIC split up and while there’s plenty of soaring choruses, this isn’t an especially commercial record.

For one thing they’re happy to play around with song structures and aren’t too fussed about hooks. There are loads of abrupt changes of mood and singer Joel Quartuccio has a habit of switching to spoken word rants in unexpected places. That doesn’t mean it always works but there’s more successes than failures.The opening "Little Richie" and "Forgetting Is Forgiving The I" are two of the better offerings. Both are hectic bursts of broken-hearted anger, Quartuccio and backing singer Michael McGough trading verses so well they occasionally blend into each other and they’d make a decent accompaniment to a ‘just been dumped tantrum.’ The closing duo of ‘Sins Of The Father’ and ‘…And Their Consequence’ meanwhile are a pretty good mix of art house Indie and screaming Hardcore anger.

It’s an admirable attempt at making the sort of music that turned its nose up at Nu-Metal back in 2001, but it’s sometimes too pretentious for its own good. Having the utterly rubbish "Ain’t Nobody Perfect" as the second track was a mistake as it leaves a nasty aftertaste for the rest of the album and "Saint Peter" is only a “how now brown bureaucrats” away from having Homer Simpson dropping a hydrogen bomb on it. Approach it with an open mind though and BEING AS AN OCEAN is a perfectly reasonable Post-Hardcore release. If you’re in the mood for a really angry cry, you could do a lot worse.