| The thing is that this tape is really pretty good. It’s one of the most pleasant listens I’ve had in months. It’s that rare kind of recording that’s almost always welcome, the qualifying “almost” being necessitated by our recent insistence on the point that Streisand and Streisand alone is good music to listen to between the hours of 6:00 and 6:30 a.m. while getting ready to go to work. Ocean is quite successful at its own small project, which is the recording of eight small ocean-evoking quasi-musical pieces. Maybe the new-agey implications of that sound like a turnoff; I know they did to me when I was reading the one-sheet. But we are not talking about your great-mother-ocean pretty-velvety-depths sort of ocean here. We are talking rather about the ocean as Melville understood it, or Homer: that vast value-neutral potentially deadly ultimately unmappable permanently mysterious expanse that was here before we were notochordal and will still be here when we have returned to the trees. There is no question that the ocean is even cooler than Morbid Angel’s “Summoning Redemption,” and therefore. does a decent job of evoking the ocean in all its incomprehensible splendor. |