Robin Staps comments on each song on the album Aeolian (2005):
The
City In The Sea - The City in the Sea is a poem by Edgar Allen
Poe. We moved around a few lines to make them fit the rhythmical patterns
of the song, but it's pretty close to the original. It was amazing to
see how that worked: to take a more or less random poem and custom-fit
it to the music... and especially with such an intricate song! Apparently
it's not a random poem though: we all love Poe, and this specific poem
really fits us, thematically. This song is our tribute to metal, in a
way, it comprises a lot of different styles and aspects, all wrapped up
in the OCEAN-vesture, of course: there is the classical re-de-de-de-de-de-opening,
followed by a chaotic fuck-your-brains-out-part, then the mid-tempo hardcore
part with these bestial vocals followed by the essential sludge/doom-part,
and then the infamous final chapter... the final chapter of this song
is among the most intricate and crushing music we've ever written - and
strangely enough, it is one of the few arrangements our drummer Torge
and me have developed jamming, more or less. We met every day for about
10 days in a row, working on the arrangements. When we played it to the
other guys in the band, they were like "fuck off, you crazy bastards!!"...
it reminds me a bit of old Confessor - except for the vocals, obviously...
Dead
Serious & Highly Professional - No comment on this one... the
title says it all!
Austerity
- The essence of that song is an existential dispute with the struggle
for passion in a world heading for its abolition, and the manifestations
of this struggle in every-day life (that term in itself appears to be
incommensurate with passionate living). The lyrics of this song deal with
some of the nasty, hostile excrescences of a society based on commodities,
wage-work, material success, individuality... and, increasingly, control.
One of these implications is the necessity of leading outlined lives for
the sake of carreer and affluence... we go to kindergarten, to school,
to university, to work, and by the time we get out of the sweep through
the institutions we're old and tired. We're being passed on from one institution
to the next and we never actually pause and live life in the present tense,
in a rewarding way. A lot of times we don't even seem to know what is
rewarding to us, our desires have been crippled so much by the permanent
exposure to the billboards and commercials of companies that take great
pains to tell us what our desires are (how fucking absurd!) that we don't
even know what is ours and what is external, what is real and what is
not. And thus it's easy to convince us that we want anything and everything,
and of course, it all comes at a price, and here, the cycle closes. The
strategy of promise and refusal of fulfillment brings about that we don't
even know what we want anymore. Hence we are content with almost everything
-- working shitty jobs doing things we don't enjoy in order to earn money
to buy things we don't need.
Killing
The Flies - This is one of the newest songs on the album. It starts
off with a tricky rhythmic pattern, pauses all of a sudden for a short
break and then comes crashing in like a derailed freight-train... this
track features the largest number of vocal contributors, 5 different singers
are screaming their guts out here, including Tomas from Breach and Nate
from Old Man Gloom. It's a song about a very dark phase of my life that
I was going through many years ago. It's about emotional dependency and
its implications. The end of the song is really majestic. The final chapter
is inaugurated instrumentally, and then Tomas Hallbom comes in and sings:
"this is the imperative of devotion: a command to consistent action...
to defend our most heartfelt convictions against attempts of self-protection
to cut them down to size of reason..." and this is what happens when
we are unconditionally in love: we cling to our love in complete disregard
of our own well-being, although we are perfectly aware that it might breed
only suffering. There is an imperative to consistency somehow inherent
in our feelings that we cannot elude.
Une
Saison En Enfer
- "Une Saison en Enfer" is the title of a book by French poet
Arthur Rimbaud, it's a collection of poems and prose, and I think that
title, as well as that book in general, perfectly represent what that
song is about. There's a verse plagiarized directly from that book, it
goes: "You that were banned from heaven and hell, murderers that
have suffered great pains, searching in oceans of absinthe, the land where
it is better to live". I'm really into Rimbaud and the whole story
of him and Verlaine, I'm actually even more interested in his life than
in his artistic, poetic achievements. Rimbaud to me reflects an individual
with a heart so passionate that in the end it turned out to be his tragic
flaw. He lost his life at the age of 37 after completely turning his back
on and even ridiculing his own artistic work and becoming a vagabond of
sorts in Ethiopia. Before that, he was working for the durch army, deserted,
fled, got banished, lived in Cyprus, Norway and Africa... though his days
on earth were few, he lived life to the fullest and experienced more than
most other people ever will, in 60 or 70 years of life on earth. That
was very inspirational for me and it also represents the spirit of THE
OCEAN.
Necrobabes.com
- I was really fascinated by that website when I found out about
it... it's not just about romanticizing dead bodies, it's all about fantasies
of killing women for sexual gratification. there are mostly comic illustrations
on that website about women being haltered, electrocuted, decapitated,
with men standing around them raping them or masturbating. It's really
nasty. the lyrics to that song make direct references to that website.
It's a song about power, in its purest form. about how permanent exposure
to sexual stimuli, to beautiful bodies on billboards and on tv, cripples
our desires and inevitably leads to sexual frustration, and how sexual
frustration leads to the quest for power, as compensation for frustration,
and to the will of using force. and it's only a small step from here to
the next step, which is gaining pleasure from using force, from violence.
and i think that scheme is true not only for sexual frustration and sexual
violence, but for any type of frustration and any type of violence, so
the song is basically just a metaphor for a larger mechanism of human
behavior. The lyrics to that song are written from the "I - perspective",
that is a treat I'm using quite a lot for the lyrics to our songs: to
put myself in the position of someone else, to see the world through his
eyes for the duration of the song, to try to think in his terms, and express
what he feels immediately. I think that is a very powerful way of communicating
lyrics, it's very direct, because the listener doesn't need to abstract,
doesn't need to interpret.
One
With The Ocean - This is one of the fast old-school tunes on the
record... it's so much fun playing that live, but if it came down to picking
one track that is to be representative of THE OCEAN, I probably wouldn't
pick this one.. when I wrote that song I was inspired by Darkane's "Rusted
Angel" record, it's one of my favourite technical death/thrash albums
ever... at some concert we played in Western Germany, a friend of mine
gave me a copy of a band, and when I put on the disc later at home I was
immediately reminded of old Darkane as soon as the vocals set in. So I
called up that dude and asked him if he was down for doing some guest
vox on our new record, and he said "yeah, sure"... The same
singer is also singing on "Une Saison en Enfer", although his
voice sounds really different here, more in the old-school hardcore vein.
He's got a good range of vocal styles.
Swoon
- If the lyrics determined the chronological order of the songs
on the album, this track would have to come right after "Killing
the Flies". It's about the end of a dark phase in my life, about
coming back to the surface, to daylight. When you have seen life through
black glasses for a long time, and all of a sudden these glasses are being
smashed off your nose (or you manage to discard them out of your own strength),
you'll be blinded by the glistening light of the outside world - and that
hurts again, but only for a short time, until you get accustomed to it.
It's a song about break-up and departure, about appreciating life again,
about seeing the good side of things and realizing that life on earth
is precious and too fucking short to waste it away being depressed and
striving for things that are impossible to achieve. In that way, it's
also a call for realism. I used to be a big-time dreamer that was constantly
collapsing at the foot of his own demands and agendas. Since I have become
a pragmatist, I have learned to appreciate life much more than ever before.
Romanticism is beautiful, but it is just as well the greatest scourge
of mankind.
Queen
Of The Food-Chain - The version of this song that is on the album
is entirely sung by Sean Ingram from Coalesce. I wanted to get him to
sing on that one from the beginning, because the verse riff is really
Coalesce-style to me. And when I sent Sean the tracks, he picked this
track from the start, and I was like "yeah, I knew it.." There's
another version of this song with entirely different vocals, sung by our
singers Meta and Nico and Tomas Hallbom from Breach, which was just released
through Danish Futhermocker label as a limited 7" record, check it
out if you can. Sean recorded his vocal tracks in the US and sent them
over to us last minute -- actually we didn't get his tracks in time before
the mastering. When I listened to his tracks I was almost shocked at first,
because he completely changed the vocal arrangements of the song, especially
the chorus. The other guest-singers have basically sung my lines the way
they were originally meant to be. So we all sat down and listened to it
and we were like, "wow, this is really... weird!". The song
"Queen of the Food-Chain" is a really old song actually, we've
been playing it live for more than 3 years, so we were really used to
our version. And now we heard something completely different, that was
quite confusing. But in the end we realized that it was just different,
not necessarily better or worse, just different, and it really started
growing on us. So we decided to go for it and Magnus Lindberg mastered
the song again, with Sean's vocals on it, last minute before the deadline...
Inertia
- Another old tune. There's an old live recording of this track
that we have done in 2002 with different instrumentation: instead of the
cello, there were trombones and flutes. The instrumentalists kind of sucked
though, the intonation was pretty bad, so we never released it. It's a
song that could have also been on "Fluxion", for it is one of
the few songs that features a long instrumental passage dominated by cello.
It's one of my favourite songs ever. There's this almost Wagner-esque
part in the middle of the song with all these celloes playing and building
up tension and a breathtaking, ever-changing drum-pattern to top it off...
it just builds and builds and then it totally explodes when the vocals
come back in, before terminating in this agonizing tempo-curve breakdown
at the end of the song... I also really dig the contrast at the beginning
of the song between Tomas Hallbom's desperate, high vocals and Meta's
low-end roars... you can also hear a surf-guitar in the first part of
the song if you listen carefully... The song is called "inertia",
and the lyrics of that song describe these rare moments of emotional weightlessness,
of being totally in unison with yourself, of being utterly content and
embracing what life holds in store for you. The lyrics to that song were
written when I was travelling in Morocco with the biggest love of my life,
and we spent some magic days in the beautiful Sahara desert surrounding
Merzouga, sleeping on rooftops at night and absorbing the out-of-this-world
loneliness of the desert at day-time, engaging in nothing but each other
and ourselves and our love.
Review
of the album »
Related links:
www.theoceancollective.com
|