Oceansize - Self Preserved While The Bodies Float Up

Oceansize have always struck us as something of a curiosity. People tar them with the ‘oh-they-write-long-proggy-songs’ brush (so said guitarist / keyboardist Gambler himself earlier this year), but then they’ve gone and soundtracked an Orange ad and been featured in ‘The OC’. What’s going on?

Make no mistake about it, the Manchester quintet’s records to date have all been deeply rooted in the prog-rock tradition, somehow managing to sound focused while they went off on mind-boggling tangents, switching between time signatures like it was going out of style.

‘Self Preserved While The Bodies Float Up’ could well be the group’s most immediate record to date. It’s a whole fifteen minutes shorter than their last effort, 2007’s ‘Frames’, and comes across as displaying an entirely new side of the band. While their first three albums were easy to admire but difficult to understand, number four carries a clear message, that of ‘We like to take risks’.

They certainly do. Opener ‘Part Cardiac’ is a shamelessly brutal four minutes of crashing guitars and theatrical vocals, with frontman Mike Vennart erupting into a blood-curdling scream near the song’s end, before it changes tack and an ominous, chugging riff finishes things. It’s blistering, uncompromising, and a contender for the heaviest song they’ve written to date - though ‘Sleeping Dogs and Dead Lions’ might have something to say about that claim.

One might expect this album to continue in much the same fashion. Indeed,Vennart has said that the album is ‘mainly heavier [than what’s gone before]’, but this isn’t really the case. Aside from ‘Part Cardiac’, ‘Build Us A Rocket Then…’ (a song which features sublime drumming from Mark Heron, one of the best sticksmen in the country) and ‘It’s My Tail And I’ll Chase It If I Want To’ (whose abrupt beginning after thirty seconds of studio noise is as unexpected as it is brilliant), ‘Self Preserved…’ is a much gentler affair than had been suggested.

The album finishes with two slow-burners, ‘Pine’ (which finds the band moving further into post-rock territory than ever before) and ‘SuperImposter’, which sounds like something Biffy Clyro might have written during the ‘Infinity Land’ sessions (an album that has much in common with this one, given that it was wildly unpredictable). There are other moments of beauty evident: ‘Silent/Transparent’ is the most fragile and affecting song they’ve written thus far.

The real star of the show is the centrepiece, ‘Oscar Acceptance Speech’, which owes something to Mew and their brand of dream-pop, riding along for a few minutes on reverb-laden vocals and piano, before a massive riff (there’s quite a few of them here, if you hadn’t already guessed) enters and the song goes stratospheric in what is possibly the single finest moment of music in 2010 so far. We say possibly because it finds its rival in the entry of the blissed-out strings around five-and-a-half minutes in. It’s indicative of the new, more gentle side of Oceansize that eventually comes to define the album, and it is nothing short of stunning.

Much the same could be said for the record itself. It’s a grower - well, not like Oceansize records ever weren’t growers - but takes hold much quicker than its predecessors. They have infused a whole new sort of intensity into their music, opting for a subtle and layered approach, as opposed to, say, ‘Homage to a Shame’, which is about as subtle as a punch in the face. The way the album builds is quite remarkable. It is a record of extremes, capturing the group at their heaviest, their softest, their loudest and their most delicate. It is, rather appropriately, ocean-sized.