Oceans of Slumber – Starlight and Ash
Release Date: 22nd July 2022
Label: Century Media Records
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Genre: New Southern Gothic
FFO: Nick Cave, Katatonia, Type O Negative.
Review By: Kira L. Schlechter
Heavy has so many permutations and definitions in this genre. Is it tritones? Is it blast beats? Is it harsh vocals? Is it apocalyptic subject matter?
Or can it be none of those things? Can it be the heaviness of the soul, or the human condition? Can it be heavy spurred by, created by, emotion?
The Houston-based band Oceans of Slumber have redefined heavy in their own image with their latest, “Starlight and Ash.” It is still occasionally “metal” in a sense and at well-chosen times, but the twisting prog/black/death complexities of their immaculate 2020 self-titled album are gone.
Singer Cammie Beverly and her partner in life and music, drummer/pianist Dobber Beverly, along with guitarists Xan Fernandez and Jessie Santos, keyboardist Mathew Aleman, and bassist Semir Ozerkan, make what Dobber calls “coastal” music in the album bio, saying there’s “voodoo here in the Gulf” and that they want to “harness that into our music and tell our stories.”
He refers in the bio to the Andrew Douglas documentary “Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus,” in which “everything in the South (is) being saints or sinners or sinners and saved.” And those are indeed some of the characters in this concept album about, as the bio says, a coastal town and “its internal struggles, (forbidden) loves, tireless maritime toil, and faith,” from internal perspectives (that is, singular people) and external (the town as a whole).
And the songs feel that way – insulated, secretive, furtive, lashing out occasionally only to close and lock the doors anew in case anyone saw. They’re also elegant, beautifully arranged, masterpieces of minimalism.
Sparse piano and Dobber’s impeccable drumming set the stage for the story’s opening, “The Waters Rising”: two people trapped in a miasma of desperate lust, sinners who are far from saved, to borrow Dobber’s comment. When he said they wanted to focus on Cammie’s voice more, this is the perfect example – it is all about her storytelling ability, her innate gift of narrating the action so appropriately to the lyrics, the precision of her diction, her throaty, burbling cries.
Their lyrics can be sexual in a beautiful, literary way, vivid and resonant, you feel them, smell them, taste them. Witness the opening lines of “drowning in your sorrow/In the belly of your cravings”; the plea for release of “Can’t you take me to the ocean’s side,” the entire second verse (“See the devil called me here/Says my name like a story/Holds my blood on the tip of her tongue.As she pulls me down into her lust”), and the reverential “In the dark we’re glowing.” It’s wrong but right at the same time in this first part of the story. The chorus changes each time; the first is like a baptism, “can you make these memories come to life … and reveal what’s hidden deep inside me,” and musically it’s languid, caressing.
Part two is the end of the honeymoon as it were, where the blame begins (“You gave birth to this longing/Along loins made of stone,” I was reluctant to sin but you made me). Cammie channels the character’s growing paranoia – “(She sees) everything … deep inside me.” And so the second chorus is frantic and desperate (“I came to the water’s edge/I’m sinking to where the lights gone out/I’ll purge what’s hidden inside”), and the music slashes and bleeds accordingly. We drift into madness as the character self-flagellates: “Demented and screaming/I have myself to blame,” but still, “I’m dying to get anywhere she might be.” Dobber’s cathartic pounding drives that siren’s call to the water, to purge, to at last be “soaking in the aftermath of what we are.” The opening line “I float face down” then comes to possibly tragic resolution in the final iteration, “I float face down/Waiting to be found,” as Cammie’s voice drifts back into the mix as if from the great beyond. Literal or figurative, you be the judge.
“Hearts of Stone” is a character study. This is someone who’ll “never shed the mess you’re in,” with “rocks in your belly,” who presents a belying front (“You smile when you want to scream/And you lie so hard it cracks your teeth”), a loser (“You’re just a stranger with vacant eyes and a hollow chest/Going around leaving what you found in a bigger mess”) who avoids responsibility for their actions. The chorus raises the hairs on your arms, with its biting, judgmental chords and sense of impending doom (“here comes the storm/You’ve been standing in for so long … You’ll never shed the mess you’re in”). It’s hard to overstate the importance of Dobber’s drumming in OOS’ music, especially in this track – things like the hitching groove before the first pre-chorus, then the internal punctuation between lines. Here, he acts as almost the very roiling in the character’s gut – he plays like a singer would sing. He drums for the songs, for the words, for the action. There’s stereotypical ways of drumming, and he does very little of it. He’s extraordinary.
“The Lighthouse” is perhaps the best example yet of the New Southern Gothic idea in several ways – certainly musically, with the jittery guitar melody that opens and closes it, the soulfulness of Cammie’s preacher-esque delivery, and Dobber’s loose, shambling fills. And lyrically – here we see the importance of faith in our imaginary small town. The desperate repetition of lines like “Press your hands together, bow your heads/Upon our knees is how we’ll make amends” and the chorus itself, “It will not let us down/It will not cast our hopes/Along the rocky shores/Of our greatest fears” (“it” being faith), gives that reliance on the divine an almost mindless feel. We are reminded of the town’s dependence on the sea, that need to appease it, with literal and figurative references to the “storm swells” and the “monsters in the mist.” And that to do so, we have to join together because “our solitude will never get us there.”
“Red Forest Roads” is deceptively short, but so much happens within it. A tender acoustic melody is the precursor to a skittering torch groove, situated in a very raw, very live-sounding mix, with seemingly unplanned but exceedingly effective touches, like the handclaps later in the first verse. Whereas the first track was from the man’s perspective, this seems to be from hers (and it may or may not be the same couple). “Right now, you only exist in my mind,” she says, “I’m living with the echoes/Of the last words you said/My heart beats like a drum/Full of dread,” so it seems it has ended. She muses, “I’m not sure what it takes to be a man/But I know you can,” as if to say he can, and should, figure it out. An almost murmured first take on the chorus, where she warns, “You’re failing, I’m falling” and adds, “You tell me not to worry/But I feel this darkness upon me,” becomes a roaring, spiralling crescendo of terror and longing the second time through that continues into the chaotic bridge, where she’s trying to “(outrun) this fear that is growing.” She calls again and again, “take me away,” to no avail beneath a final acoustic melody. It’s visceral and chilling.
Stripped to the barest of percussion and acoustic guitar and the uneasy intimacy of Cammie’s dispassionate and unsettling observations, “The Hanging Tree,” in a weird way, made me realize that the whole John Mellencamp “Small Town” thing is a feel-good oversimplification. Being from a small town in America myself, this song is what it’s REALLY like. If you know, you know – “This place will hold for me what cannot be said” (the secrecy, the trying to find privacy, but feeling like you’re always being watched); “This place’s serenity a time-lapse lie … And the peace within me is a lie by design” (that whole keeping up appearances to fit in thing; the environment almost encourages and rewards paranoia); knowing that “Somewhere forever pieces of us remain” (you can’t escape it, for better or worse); and the dénouement of the last lines, “Hidden in plainview secrecy/This place is haunted if you want it to be.” Yeah, it’s still haunted. Trust me.
“Salvation” is a languid, shimmering slow burn led by Cammie’s seething vocals and Semir’s throaty, wandering bass. It’s a gospel-rooted testament to the southern (and also small town) home, where there’s “Nothing there to keep my heart from wondering/But there I’m tethered” (there’s nothing there, but you can’t leave it), with references to faith (“Where we go to be reborn/A baptism in forever”), and nature (“Where the sunsets glow/And the trees bend down”). It’s ultimately, too, the place you will go when you die (“I’ll meet the Shepherd’s call”). The repeated refrain of “Raise him up/Bring him south to where the ole bells call … he’s coming home, lay him below” explodes into a choir-laden dirge at the end, Cammie’s descant and the dual guitars slicing above the grief and bringing release and even joy.
“Star Altar” is those two sinners again, the “snakes of Eden” – the humid, potent imagery of “The scent of a rabid man/As he grabs her hips and hands,” that feeling that we can’t stop sinning (“Oh to keep control/You just can’t let us go,” neither one can give it up), the idea that our time together is limited (“Writhing in glass and sand/Grasping at what you can”). There’s no real verses, just what I’d call repeated refrains, and a chorus full of futility: “The days ahead/Our fear behind/Our hope ahead/And yet we struggle to climb … Our hope ahead as darkness surrounds us.” It’s almost sing-song up to this point, that repetition is the personification of that vicious circle of sinning, the music swinging and lazy. Cammie again is expert at mimicking with her voice what Dobber is doing with the groove. And then the anger bursts free at this “bitter life,” this “flickering life,” that’s filled with “starlight” but also “ash.” It’s metal as it gets in this section, and then the track veers between the two parts in mad frustration – nothing is resolved, life is still bitter and short, and we still can’t stop sinning.
“The Spring of ‘21” is Dobber’s emotional, wrenching piano interlude, a moment of reflection with a light, spiralling conclusion.
Serving as the perfect transition after the instrumental, “Just A Day” again leads with piano and Cammie’s airy, fragile, vulnerability. It seems like the resolution of “Star Altar” – she realizes how much she needs him (“In your arms I’m defenseless/In your eyes I’m everything I want to be”) and reminisces, “When I was a little girl/I dreamed of all I would become/And broken wasn’t one I ever thought I’d linger on.” But it contains perhaps the biggest musical plot twist ever – there’s a pause that feels like an inhale before it blasts apart with buzzing feedback and measured, bleak guitar chords full of self-hatred as Cammie rages, “I can’t stand a moment with myself” and admits, “I don’t wanna be the reason that we fail.” The music continues to tear asunder around her as she batters herself against him (“I fight, I yell, I fall/Back into your open arms”), her voice tiny amid the massiveness around it. Then it speeds into near thrash territory (and perhaps madness) as she finally cries, “I need you/My darling.”
“House of the Rising Sun” needs no introduction, and in a way, it more sets a sense of place (the South as a whole) than acts as part of the fictional town’s history or the story’s plot. It’s exquisitely arranged, with piano, plucked acoustic, and a wonderful fiddle part that hearkens most effectively to the song’s folk roots. As does Cammie’s perspective – we’re so used to hearing it sung by a man that it gives this old number an intriguing twist when she sings, “It’s been the ruin of many a poor girl/And God, I know, I’m one.”
The final piece, “The Shipbuilder’s Son” profiles the town’s workers, the “servants to the wind and the sea,” the “builders of great sea monsters,” the ones who give their lives “in the toil of this harsh land.” In the greatest of ironies, though, they have “never sailed away/To see where the dark clouds go,” they’ve never been “where the sunset meets the shore … where their souls are longing to go/In hopes of so much more.” In the bio, this is said to be the companion piece to “The Lighthouse,” and it is: “their faith now long forgotten … their dreams lay lost and buried.” And they know it, but there’s nothing they can do, as the tense lines note: “The cool breeze mocks the men below/Singing of places they’ll never know/A harsh wind carries away their tears/As the salty air wears away the years.” A piano break halts everything, as they again recall their wasted potential, and the song breaks open as they again rail impotently at the crushing work that has stolen their youth.
Where OOS’ previous album was demanding in its complexity, “Starlight & Ash” is equally so in its austerity, its subtlety, its focus. It’s weirdly more accessible (to a more general audience) and yet more inaccessible (in that it’s not textbook “heavy”). So treat it more as just an album by just a band that happens to be at the height of its creative power — metal or no, “heavy” or no. Because that’s what it is.
(5 / 5)
