Oceansize Everyone Into Position

I fell out of love with The Rock a while back. Not the wrestler-turned-actor, you understand, the musical format. I gave up on it when the meatheads took over the asylum - wave after wave of comedy nu-metal beards and identical sounds, bland punk rock and Britrock stragglers. Oceansize's new album is the first new album that I would classify as 'rock' that I've really approved of in a while. It's bigger and wider in scope than most rock acts out there at the moment though - Kaiser Chiefs this ain't. Then again, Mogwai this also ain't. Certainly, Music For A Nurse has a fair wash of almost My Bloody Valentine-ish guitars, and the average track length is closer to six minutes than five, but this is accessible, hook-y stuff.

The opening three tracks all purvey something of the brooding basslines that thread throughout the record, and Mike Vennart's almost Cornell-esque vocals. Soundgarden's swirling, dreamy passages drop sharply into something approaching the crunching rhythms that James Hetfield would be proud of, and it's as well to bring up bands of that stature now: they're not known for making a minimal noise. Oceansize are the probably the most aptly-named band since Queen - they sound absolutely huge. I mean, vast. Probably something to do with that is the production team involving past collaborators with Doves and Coldplay. Not as populist as either, nevertheless the bold sense of scale evident in these bands will out, especially in the monolithic final pairing of You Can't Keep A Bad Man Down and Ornament/The Last Wrongs.

The band describe the final three tracks (including the previous, Mine Host) as a "church suite". There's organ in there, at least. Mine Host progresses as a slow-burner, but is actually the shortest track on here at 4:10. The real gems lie in the bombastic You Can't Keep... and the dramatic, choral closer. There's a pleasingly abrupt stop in the former, which heralds the second part of the song, an almost angelic interlude before the world appears to crash down around your ears in a hail of guitars and drum rolls.

Ornament/The Last Wrongs is another builder, again with the abrupt shifts from gentle, soothing niceties to beefy, jarringly overdriven breaks. It all falls into context when the main vocals come in. I hate to compare it to Beethoven's 9th, but like that semi-mythical moment you don't really expect choral vocals to come in at this point, and it brings the track together for another build. The church suite ends as it started, on fading ecclesiastical organs.

It's never as seemingly free-form as, say, Mogwai, but there's an admirable restraint all the same: where they could have gone completely overboard, the song is still the central focus. There's an intangible sense of grandeur throughout that many bands fail to achieve, a fairy-dust sprinkling of epic-ness, if you will. They certainly have ideas big enough, and its not always a comfortable, easy listen. So more power to them: the world has been lacking since Pink Floyd went their separate ways...