ALBUM REVIEW: Den Tredje Dagen – Ocean Chief
After a twenty year career, and nearly five years since their last release, Swedish four piece OCEAN CHIEF return to us with new album Den Tredje Dagen. OCEAN CHIEF promise a haunting collection of tracks, that doesn’t overwork their music to give a truly harsh and dark experience. Will they deliver?
Title track Den Tredje Dagen has atmosphere from the off, a looming mountainous riff that trudges across the soundscape. Staining vocals rattle over the disjointed, droning riff, the entire collective with their instruments all set in wails and moans. It takes its time, winding up into a fierce, melancholy beast, weighted down by its own heaviness. A decent start, but not the most captivating for a first track.
Hyllningen is considerably more tempered off the bat, a tapping bass drum barely audible as it accompanies another haunting doom inflected melody. After a minute of warming up, the crashing wave of high fuzz and distortion swells around your ears. The disdain and stripped back melancholy is palpable, but it doesn’t stop there. At almost twelve minutes long, it has plenty of time to work in some creative ideas and soundscapes, strange nonconforming noises arise and then call back, alternating drudging like a new battering of the tide. This is a very stretched out approach to doom, leaning heavily into one booming chord, and giving more than enough time before shunting into the next. It might be a little too bare to keep the attention of some, but will create a decent amount of atmosphere for others.
Finally, a little more flavour is spiked into Dömd‘s, which creaking feedback and climbing notes, the incremental movements achingly haunting, then the decent back down with roaring vocals makes for a decent use on the consistent tempo. The sudden beating the vocals give, more rage filled than ever is a nice tonal change, like being hit in the face with cold water you weren’t expecting. Things pick up momentum ever so fractionally and seem to be taking you down more avenues of heavy destruction, the droning shift between drum and guitar hitting its stride at the eight or nine minute mark. It’s thoroughly meandering, however, and really doesn’t make the use of it’s over fifteen-minute run time; so many slight indications things were about to get interesting go unexplored and the same melodic styling remains the focal point.
Flitting back to the cleaner tone opening of Hyllningen, Den sista resan has a little more complexity to its riff, and the drums are given a little more pattering to do while the atmosphere builds. There’s a breath of a second guitar underneath everything, ghostly and distant, ever rising and desperate to be seen. If there were such a thing on such a drawn-out string of tunes, this might the interluding track, at dead on seven minutes it’s the shortest song on here and the most different feeling in its gate and tempo. That condensing of time means that all the interesting ideas are much more compact and easier to appreciate, and the lack of hard-hitting fuzz and stomp means the smaller intricacies are allowed more space to manifest.
Our final outing with OCEAN CHIEF is Dimension 5, and it’s the strongest contender on this record by a mile. It’s opening takes an interesting journey through the lighter end of their tone, with plenty of rising unrest before the fuzz kicks in and lands the punch that you’ve been craving. Finally getting the balance between backing off and crashing in just right, it’s a shame that the rest of the record feels like one big uneventful moment after another until this point. The riff is continuously changing up, with enough variation in dynamics between rhythm and melody to inspire a real interest. The sweet battering of it’s first half is met with a tense middle section that really scrapes into the darkest, grosses and most mysterious tones possible for such monumentally towering doom. Swirling motions and echoing sweeps feel like being caught on the edge of precipice in some monstrous Lovecraftian place, waiting to have your mind crumpled under the weight of what’s to come. And it does come, that second wave of utterly mesmerising despair. It’s surreal, alien and unfamiliar, even in it’s softer ending, it does not feel like a light and airy passage into something heavenly, but the slow spiral out into nothingness.
For pure doom fans, what OCEAN CHIEF have created will work just fine, creating a dense and desolate soundscape that conjures plenty of melancholy. It’s utterly uncompromising in its form, a true doom fanatics dream. You’ll feel dejected and bitter if this is your cup of tea, no question. However, the stripped back nature of Den Tredje Dagen, while it keeps to strictly doom tropes, doesn’t offer enough in the way of innovation to create any meaning in the droning tones. It’s only in it’s final track does something truly spark a raw emotional chord, a heart of darkness that throughout the rest of the record just feels like filling time.
Rating: 6/10
Den Tredje Dagen is out on April 17th via Argonauta Records.
Like OCEAN CHIEF on Facebook.