Oceans Of Slumber: Unafraid To Speak
In 2022, Texan progressive death metallers OCEANS OF SLUMBER surprised fans with Starlight And Ash, a bold departure from their previous records in that it almost entirely jettisoned the death metal aspects of their sound, expanding their gothic influences and penning a deeply personal record that, for one reason or another, didn’t get the love it deserved not only for its bold creative choices but for its sheer quality, too. With that, they ended up departing their previous label and finding a new home in Season Of Mist and also crafted perhaps their most grandiose work yet.
Where Gods Fear To Speak is an album that embraces all OCEANS OF SLUMBER have learned so far as well as bringing back the extremity and dialling up the melodrama, to create a bold, exploratory concept album about religious fanaticism, christofascism and, much as the band have done so over their career, daring to defect from the accepted norm or what’s expected of them. With all that, and the album notes pitching its concept somewhere between Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, we caught up with vocalist Cammie Gilbert-Beverly and drummer Dobber Beverly to talk about this new creative leap.
First of all is the obvious – with Where Gods Fear To Speak re-embracing death metal after the sublime “New Southern Gothic” of before, why now? “The world is in a different place for us,” Dobber explains simply. “It’s revealed itself to be far more aggressive, there’s a lot crazier shit going on.” Although he’s not entirely convinced this is a big shift in sound once taken in context of their history. “I thought about this the other day. We’re not your favourite restaurant, our records are. Like, if you want the more contemplative, rainy day kind of take you home, feel-good meal, then you take Starlight And Ash. But if you’re a bigger fan of what we did on our self-titled, go there.”
Cammie agrees, expanding; “we don’t stamp the same shape every time we do something, we interpret the life around us. All our albums are reflections of that, and reactionary to what’s happening around us. We are a bit angry, and we are a bit disenfranchised with how things have gone for us and are going in the world.” Channelling that anger and frustration, they envisaged the dystopian future not dissimilar to V For Vendetta’s theocratic regime; “it paints a morbid picture of someone struggling in a world of extreme religious oversight, where it’s life or death to worship or express faith.”
Where Gods Fear To Speak is very deliberately constructed to, as Dobber explains, divorce itself from notions of Western religiosity and Christianity; “I thought of Richard Dawkins’ concept that the way the grace of God’s hand extends to you has more to do with your geographical location than your faith. It seems it’s generally better for those with more means in Western-touched societies, and that’s why I referenced the Dark Tower series.” Prayer very much tackles this head on, the narrator having “called God’s name in every way”, while The Impermanence Of Fate and I Will Break The Pride Of Your Will are linked with their notions of God as an absentee landlord.
It paints a bleak picture of a world in which conforming is mandatory, something Dobber sees as a real threat in today’s world. “With the homogenisation of society, the powers that be are trying to mangle us all into a cattle class with one music, one taste. Maybe it’s a construct of greed, maybe God isn’t so much a representation of that but maybe who God is, is changing.” That painting isn’t always broad strokes or themes; they often zoom into minutiae, such as a love story that’s threaded through and almost told in the background, but is no less important to humanising the story.
As Cammie explains, “it’s talking about what you go through, the relationships you have, the love story is in there, it’s a really sharp look at the struggle of loving someone who is throwing themselves into insanity fighting something, and maybe has this goal or dream that’s bigger than anything else to them.” Dobber also notes that they’re trying to convey an experience based on their own knowledge, that they’ve consistently tried to expand on themselves, whether through reading or films (“I went through a really heavy spell of Andre Tarkovsky and Jonas Mekas,” Dobber says), one that won’t necessarily be something that everyone can immediately identify with or empathise with if they have a more limited frame of reference – but that OCEANS OF SLUMBER are always trying to help expand that with their approach to music.
That’s partly why the record was recorded in Bogota, Colombia, rather than closer to home. “We’re musicians first and foremost, deeply into the art of music. If I sit in front of a laptop with a fucking plugin and play guitar into it, then I’m not making myself a musician in the communal sense of playing music. It’s supposed to be communal!” That communal experience, and desire to expand both theirs and listeners’ palettes and even opinions, is strongly felt through Where Gods Fear To Speak, a desire they’ve inarguably achieved. This is OCEANS OF SLUMBER at their boldest, sonically and thematically, and while the fictional society they describe through the album may fear to speak, they most certainly do not.
Where Gods Fear To Speak is out now via Season Of Mist.
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