OCEAN: “Here Where Nothing Grows” (Important Records)

from Germany's Concrete Webzine

Behold Ocean : a pulverizing sludge leviathan utterly aflame with gargantuan fuzz, distortion, wah-wah, feedback, you name it. There are roughly 65 minutes of music on “Here Where Nothing Grows”, only three songs and each of them varying between 19 and 25 minutes. The 2 track demo ( Review : 30 /10/05 ) already was an indication of how annihilating this band can be, but this album reaches pinnacles of creepiness and heaviness that most bands can only dream of. After a brief intro, “First Reign” throws the listener deep into Ocean’s apocalyptic bleak ravaged abyss, using a sense of sparse minimalism and repetition to achieve gradual, swelling impact. Every pounding drum beat and every abrasive trance guitar riff is painstakingly gruesome and suffocating, the music’s lumbering snail pace is ultimately lethal. Believe it or not but Ocean sounds like Electric Wizard to 16RPM (remember the antique record players). The songs First Reign, Salt and The Fall manage to be droner-inducing ( Sunn), atmospheric (Pelican), repetitive (Grief) and prozac doom (Sleep’s“Jerusalem”/Winter’s“Into darkness”) all at once.

I have been listening to this constantly over the last weeks and I keep wanting to hear it again. Only the best albums provoke these kind of chills, thrills and kills. And, like an ebola virus, once the album enters your bloodstream, you're infected. This is about as heavy as they come.

93/100