Oceans of Slumber, The Banished Heart

Metal — well, good metal, at least — is a delicate balancing act. That seems weird to say, really, given that it’s a musical genre built around heaviness, whether you’re talking about guitars or drums or even vocals, but it’s true. Going too far in any one direction can derail a band’s sound completely; I’ve lost track of the number of bands I’ve seen over the years who were promising but then slid sideways into being cheeseball parodies of themselves.

That said, if your band doesn’t try things that are new, instead treading over the same damn ground over and over again, well, you’re boring and trite. I’ve lost track of the gigantic pile of bands I’ve heard who’ve fallen victim to that particular pitfall, too. The band who doesn’t go either way, who walks that tightrope, they seem like unicorns sometimes, like mythical creatures I’m never sure really existed in the first place.

The reason I’m starting with this is to say that Oceans of Slumber are that band; they’re the unicorn, the tightrope-walker, the band that can both experiment and not go too far overboard. And holy shit are they good.

A little history, though: I saw this band once, several years ago, opening for another, better-known band. And while they weren’t bad, per se, they weren’t great, either, and it took me a while to realize what was going wrong — their singer just didn’t work. He was a decent singer, sure, but he didn’t fit with the music the band was playing behind him; if he’d been fronting a more rootsy, AC/DC-ish act, a band that was all about partying down and getting loaded, he would’ve been just fine.

As it was, he wasn’t the right guy for the band. So I shrugged and went on my way, and was surprised as hell a year or so later to learn that he’d left the band and had been replaced by new singer Cammie Gilbert.

“Huh; I wonder what she sounds like,” I thought, and went looking for something the band had recorded recently, finding what would end up going on their then-forthcoming album Winter. What I heard was stunning — Gilbert’s got a powerful, intense, massive voice, the kind that can fill an arena and still feel like it needs to break free. “This,” I thought, “this is the singer this band needed all along.”

Fast-forward to now, and Oceans of Slumber’s new album, The Banished Heart, and everything seems to have fallen into place, just like it was meant to. It’s the same band on Heart that I saw up on the stage way back when, with the exception of Gilbert, but their sound has evolved to a startling degree, growing by leaps and bounds even since those last recordings I listened to.

The Oceans of Slumber that exists now is a pretty incredible listen, melding together elements of heavy, thundering thrash, swooning Gothic metal, and even folk and retro-synth sounds to make something that doesn’t resemble most metal acts I’ve heard lately (and yes, that’s a good thing).

The Banished Heart declares its intentions right at the beginning, starting off atmospheric and minimal with “The Decay of Disregard,” which is initially just a piano and some distant synth sounds. Once the band really comes in, they’re still somewhat subdued, slow-moving and melancholy, although with a technical edge to ’em and hyperdistorted, crunching guitars.

When Gilbert starts singing, it’s hard to escape comparisons to old-school Killswitch Engage — there’s a similarity in the voices and in the style of singing, at least in the clean parts, between Gilbert and Howard Jones, as well as an undercurrent of sadness, of mourning to the whole thing. That said, other things come to mind, too, like Evanescence’s heavier moments (although Oceans of Slumber far outstrips that band, for my money) or Tori Amos’s chilling cover of Slayer’s “Raining Blood”.

Amos pops into my head later on, as well, on the title track, with its fragile vocals and subtle, high-pitched piano sound; it’s delicate and sweet and yearning, and then the guitars and drums come crashing in to destroy it all. Towards the end of that track, though, the guitars disappear and the piano itself morphs into more atmospheric keyboards. When the guitars come back in for the final time, the song transforms into a full-blown synth-metal crescendo that comes off like Andrew W.K. at his most bombastic.

My initial thought upon hearing this album was that Gilbert was far and away the bright light of the band, the real reason to give it a listen, but over the course of Heart, I had to revise that opinion somewhat. She’s great, to be sure, but the band as a whole is stellar; the musicianship is tremendous throughout, whether it’s the gorgeous-sounding, Scale The Summit-esque guitar work on “Fleeting Vigilance” or guitarist/singer Sean Gary’s just-rough-enough growl on “At Dawn”. Gilbert may be the frontwoman, but the guys in the band — Gary, guitarist Anthony Contreras, bassist Keegan Kelly, drummer Dobber Beverly, and keyboardist Beau Beasley (cleverly disguised in the credits as “Uaeb Yelsaeb”) — are all truly talented musicians in their own right.

“At Dawn,” by the by, may be my favorite track on the album — it hits all the bases, with those lush, operatic vocals, the twisting, mind-warping guitar riffs, and heavy, thundering, unrelenting rhythms all constructed together to make what is damn near a perfect metal song. It’s equal parts beauty, heaviness, and intensity, in a way few bands can ever match.

A close second is “A Path to Broken Stars,” where Contreras and Gary’s guitars do this crazy quasi-duet thing where they’re almost playing the same riffs but not quite, creating an effect that’s like an echo of sorts inside your skull. It reminds me of the interplay between Queensryche guitarists Chris DeGarmo and Michael Wilton, and that’s no bad thing in my book. And then there’s the vocals, where Gilbert’s voice is both soothing and eerie as she repeats the same lines over and over above the churning, chiming guitars. It’s utterly mesmerizing.

Little bits of weirdness pop up all over The Banished Heart, whether it’s the spooky Gothic feel of “Howl of the Rougarou,” with its scratchy acoustic guitar intro, or the murky bed of retro-’80s synth menace on “The Watcher,” an instrumental track that wouldn’t sound out of place on Stranger Things. Later on, second instrumental “Her in the Distance” is somber and elegaic, just slow-moving strings (I think?) and piano over distant-sounding thunder.

The album draws near to a close with “No Color, No Light,” a stately, majestic-sounding duet with clean, theatrical-sounding female and male vocals that again makes me think of Queensryche, and Oceans of Slumber finish things out with a beautifully stark, haunting cover of the folk standard “Wayfaring Stranger,” which itself sounds like it should serve as the soundtrack for a subtle, deliberate horror movie set deep in Appalachia.

Oceans of Slumber is a rare breed of metal band, the kind that’s less about headbanging and more about — at the risk of getting all emo — feeling. The tracks on The Banished Heart are all heavy with a sadness that’s never fully explained but is impossible not to feel, and it’s a genuine feeling, not some faux-mopey put-on. There’s a lot of pain there, and some vulnerability, as well, and that’s impressive to see. The now-traditional metal ballad aside, metal bands aren’t exactly known for their introspection.

Beyond that, with Heart this band proves that it absolutely knows what its doing, and that while it can do all kinds of things, it can also tighten its focus inward, compressing all those disparate pieces together into a whole until it begins to shine brighter than it ever did before. That’s what listening to this album is like, and it’s amazing to witness.