Band Reviews: Oceansize

This should have come out on Saturday, but unfortunately for my readers I was busy giving moral support to my two friends Justin and Pierre, who were getting wonderful tattoos, which took most of the day, but at least it's here now so happy reading.

Oceansize are a wonderful Progressive Rock band from Manchester, England consisting of 5 members, namely Mike Vennart on guitar and lead vocals, Steve Durose playing lead guitar and backing vocals, Gambler on lead guitar and keyboards, Steven Hodson on bass and keyboards and Mark Heron on drums.

Being a prog band their songs are all quite long, with the average length being around 8 minutes of pure bliss, taking the listener on a scenic journey of melodic and smooth keyboard sounds, strong bass lines, unconventional time signatures punctuated with tight double kick and explosive cymbal fills, emotional lead lines and strong, driving rhythmic guitars.

This may sound rather overwhelming, but the beauty of their music is found in the fact that they have managed to put all of this in without bombarding the first time listener, and still rewarding the consumate fan who will listen to the songs over and over again, each time finding a new detail he or she had missed the first 30 times. Oceansize have succeeding with something Dream Theater have never been able to do, hiding their details.

You see with a band like Dream Theater, it is easy for a person to feel attacked by the amount of detail in every drum fill, or keyboard line, or guitar riff just because there is so much there. But with Oceansize it is completely the opposite, and in fact easy to misunderstand them as an above average rock band with long songs, which is certainatly not the case.

So other than hiding their brilliance really well, what else makes Oceansize worth listening to? Well, they have a wonderful way of blending melody with aggression by using vocal effects and distorted guitars, and while using this processing the sounds they choose are very natural, working well with every other modulator and effect in the song.

Another thing that sets Oceansize apart from many other band is how they are able to combine so many instruments together, and get them to work. The band has a rhythm guitarist, a lead guitarist, a keyboardist, a bassist and a drummer. Sometimes they even have three guitar parts and a keyboard part, bass and drums, so that makes things quite interesting.

Usually with a band, when they do that type of thing you lost perspective in the mid range, and the song ends up sounding messy, lose and unfocused. But in Oceansize's case they have perfected the art of writing music for each part around each other, so that the emotion of the song is communicated rather than just being flashy or technically intricate.

There's just too much to this wonderful band, and I could never effectively communicate what they are about or how they do it so well, you can only appreciate them fully when you give them a good listen, but not only once, you need to listen to each song more than once in order to actually get a good perspective of what they are doing. And I think you'll be plesantly surprised to be able to add another wonderful band to your collection...