Reviews

This band is pretty much what Rise has been known to sign these past couple of years.  With that being said, there are still some rather none-Rise type bands on the label including American Me, Recon and It Prevails.  I would defiantly associate Oceana with Rise even before looking on the back of the album; they just fit that mold that Rise has established.  I had checked out a few songs before I got to listen to the full record, and they weren’t bad, I thought they had something to offer musically…

The “Intro” track is pretty much a waste of space and is easily skipped.  The first song, “Accountable,” isn’t bad - the singing is good and it has a decent breakdown.  It’s nothing amazing, but it’s a decent first track.  The second track, “Mindless: Mindless,” continues the same feel of the first song, the singing once again is great and the riffs are good.  “Portrait” is a bit more of a low-key song, just less breakdowns and less riffage.  The title track, “The Tide,” is one of the heaviest on the album and sort of goes back and forth from the heavy breakdowns to the more low-key, ambient stuff from the previous song.  “Isolophobia” is a short interlude that provides a break and really does only that.  “Hello, Astronaut” is for the most part a cute breakdown with some filler parts; nothing special, but it’s catchy. And “Conductor” continues the same feel as the other songs before it.  At this point in the record, it is pointless for me to describe the rest of the songs because most of them are the same thing.

My main problem with this record is simple; it’s just too generic and repetitive.  The breakdowns are all the same or similar, and the songs all sound the same.  The band tried to take something that everyone out there is doing right now and change it a little; really it hasn’t been changed much at all.  Instead, it makes things worse than just playing the generic sound well, which might have gotten them 3 stars.  I like the guitar parts but they just fall secondary to the simple, basic breakdowns in almost every song.  Also, I don’t like their screamer really; he doesn’t sound very good and if you don’t sound good on record you can only sound worse live.  He also screams at times when I think more singing would sound so much better.  This band also rips off Underoath a lot, especially the album Define the Great Line; being from the same area doesn’t help their argument against it being true either.  I’ve heard some people online compare this to Hopesfall’s The Satellite Years, which I can see, but that’s an insult to Hopesfall.  On that CD, all of the songs are different and don’t just have breakdowns.  Hopesfall is in no way generic, Oceana is.  In the end, if you’re new to this stuff called metalcore, then this will probably sound good to you, but if you’re like me and you hear a dozen of these bands a day, then you’ll pass this one up.