The sea at its roughest is most difficult to fathom. There are patterns, governed by laws of physics, but to the human eye it is an impenetrable maelstrom of white foam, surging swells and waves that seem to turn themselves inside out before shattering out of existence. But if you concentrate, you can always see the beauty in it.
And so to this album, Bioluminescence, by Dawn of Ouroboros. The band say that the music is inspired by the ocean – and much of what I described above could also be said about this album. I grew up near the sea – and I have struggled to breathe in the claustrophobia of a barrage of storm-swell waves rolling in, as well as marvelled at the beauty of an early-morning swim in the calm. To hear the concept of the ocean expressed in atmospheric black metal makes perfect sense.
The metal here may be black (or post-black, if you want to be picky), with hints of death here and there – but there are shafts of melody and periods of respite where things go a bit proggy, or in some instances, a tad Berlin School, with sequenced synth pulses carrying the song.
And on first listen it appears inaccessible – again, mirroring the sea in a cyclone. It begins with the title track, which starts with a 30-second squall of blast beats and tremolo guitar, before going all clean and woozy.
It is an aural representation of holding your eyes open when being pummelled by a wave, then coming up for air in a lull to find the sun shining and the surface calm. It returns to the intensity, with Chelsea Murphy’s vocals switching effortlessly and excellently from a harsh black-metal bark, through a soothing, smoky clean, to a guttural death roar. Murphy frequently improvises her vocals within a song, which is offset by the scientific approach taken by guitarist Tony Thomas (also of Botanist, and who is an actual scientist in real life).
And the concept of improvisation in a work with a marine theme is an interesting one. Improvising implies randomness (within parameters), but we as humans find it extremely difficult to be truly random. Just like waves crashing onto a beach or into a cliff appear chaotic, their journey is in fact governed by the weather, shape of the land and the power of the swell itself.
Sorry for the navel-gazing. In my brain, atmospheric black metal with epic shoegaze elements such as in Bioluminescence provokes deep thoughts. Maybe it is the speed of the drums, coupled with the near-white-noise of the mid-range frequencies in the guitar.
This is the third album by Dawn of Ouroboros and the second for Prosthetic. I must confess that before hearing this one, I hadn’t come across the band before. And I also have to confess that time constraints prevented me from taking as deep a dive into their back catalogue as I wanted. So if you’re after context, then sorry.
What I can say is that this album, once you’re in, envelops you. Long blackened passages give way to exceedingly satisfying palm-muted guitar work, with quiet, calming interludes drenched in reverb. And yet somehow it avoids becoming a cockentrice of an album. This switching between modes is most pronounced in ‘Slipping Burgundy’, which shifts from bleak to bliss and back again effortlessly. And the final song, ‘Mournful Ambience’, is a piano-led ambient/gothic/something piece that is a fine way to close the album. The calm after the storm, if you like.
(Cockentrice, by the way is a medieval dish of various animals sewn together to make a grotesque and ostentatious feast. But anyway, back to the music.)
Dawn of Ouroboros have said in the past that they do not write with a specific audience in mind – they just go where the mood takes them. But the attachment of an over-arching ocean theme helps to avoid an excess of introversion. By explicitly naming a concept, the listener is able to interpret the various moods of the songs as part of the theme. The theme may be difficult to fathom, but once you’re in, it is thrilling. A bit like the sea.
