The ocean is a simple symbol used to denote the enormous body of water that occupies two thirds of the planet’s surface. The ocean itself is by no means simple. It’s vastness, immense depth and complex ecosystems are the source of endless fascination, and too much to comprehend at once. The Ocean is also a progressive metal band from Berlin, which has a predilection towards dense instrumentation and conceptual subject matter.
For the band’s latest record, 2013’s Pelagial, songwriter Robin Staps wanted to craft a musical analogue for the band’s namesake. Pelagial is one hour of continuous music, which unfurls as a journey through the separate layers of the ocean. At times, it’s a delicate and serene listen, at others it’s aggressive and remorseless. It’s safe to say composing an album of such ambitious scope requires a certain obsessive tenacity.
“I wrote the album in a matter of three weeks,” says Staps. “That sounds quick, but it was three weeks of doing nothing else but writing music, so it’s a lot of hours. I’m a crazy perfectionist and I want to really be in control of everything when it comes to writing. So I do drive myself crazy, but it’s a rewarding experience.
“It’s not that I’m stressing myself the whole time,” he adds. “I wrote the album in a house on the Spanish coast looking out to the sea – an incredibly inspiring place I’ve been going to since I was a child. When I’m there, things flow and happen naturally. When I get tired, I jump in the sea and take a swim and then I get new ideas.”
Staps’ relatively relaxed approach to this gargantuan project could be explained by the fact that Pelagial isn’t The Ocean’s first concept album. However, the nature of this project did put him up against a brand new challenge.
“Pelagial’s different from any of our previous records, mainly in this holistic approach to it,” he says. “The ‘Centric records [Heliocentric, Anthropocentric] were also conceptual records, but more from a lyrical, philosophical point of view. Pelagial was the first record that was really written as one piece of music from the beginning to the end.”
Interestingly, Staps planned Pelagial as an entirely instrumental work. It wasn’t until late in the recording process that The Ocean vocalist Loïc Rossetti expressed interest in making a contribution. “All the vocals were written very rushed, after the album had been done,” Staps says. “That’s what a lot of people don’t really see and that makes me happy because that means it’s worked out well.”
At first, the addition of vocals posed something of a dilemma for Staps. Having fleshed out the album’s concept in the instrumentals, he feared that lyrics would blemish his vision. To evade this danger, Rossetti’s lyrics portray a separate conceptual journey, which looks into the depths of the human psyche.
“I really couldn’t even imagine vocals on the record by the time the instrumental songwriting process was finished,” Staps says. “Part of the decision why I wrote this to be instrumental is that Loïc was very ill. The other thing was that the whole album concept didn’t really seem to allow for vocals. It’s a journey from the surface to the bottom of the sea. What are you going to sing about? Sperm whales fighting giant squid?
“Then Loïc recovered and wanted to be on the record, so we decided to record vocals for the last two tracks of the record. We did that and it sounded great, then we started fooling around, trying out bits and pieces here and there and had some really cool ideas. Loïc and me together have really cool creative feedback in the studio. By the end of the week we had a bunch of awesome vocal parts and we were like ‘This has to be an album with vocals’.”
The Ocean will head to Australia this month for a run of club shows, where they’ll perform Pelagial in full. Given its holistic nature, Pelagial leaves very little room for attentions to waver.
“It’s a really visual show,” Staps says. “We want to suck the listener into our little cosmos that we’re roaming in. That is by means of the music first and foremost, but also the visuals and the lighting. It has a bit of film score feel to it, which is intensified by there being visuals. That’s what we were after, to not leave any pauses where people can applaud or get a beer at the bar. We like to perform this as one block of music. You get into it and then you get out at the end, but not in between.
“It’s a very predictable show if you know the record,” he adds, “but it wouldn’t make sense really to move stuff around. It was a huge challenge to write an album like that and then to perform it like that. I’m very happy we’ve managed to do it in a way that’s satisfying for us.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
