CD Review: Oceansize - Everyone Into position (Beggars Banquet, 2005)

Girth. Wideness. Voluminousness. Really fucking large humungousness. That's what Brit-brain-rock heroes Oceansize strive for.

That all-enveloping blanket of sound - covering, submerging, bewildering and occaisionally battering the listener with layer upon layer of pink noise. And you know what? It really works.

Everyone Into Position is the second full-length album from the Manchester five-piece, the follow-up to 2003's stunning Effloresce, a record which wowed pretty much everyone that heard it, with its mix of the post-rock sensibilities of Mogwai and the metal nous of Tool. The band aren't ready to rest on their laurels though, and instead of regurgitating the same-old space rock epics, they have been steadily growing their sound into something even more hard to pin down.

The album is at the same time heavier and more chilled than their debut. Tracks like Music For A Nurse and Meredith sound like slow-motion fire, licking at the ears before they build almost inperceptibly to car-crash levels on intensity. Meredith itself contains some of the most monged out sounds I've ever heard - an off key electronic noise hidden behind the music playing havok with your brain. Awesome.

On the other side of the scale, songs such as A Homage to a Shame and No Tommorow take no prisoners, and tear into the listener with glorious three guitar violence and blastbeats that sound more like Sikth than My Bloody Valentine. Obviously building on the experiments on the Music for Nurses EP, the heavy tracks on the album are amoung the most complicated and satisfying pieces the band have ever written, and longtime fans will be shocked and pleased by just how good the band have got. Of course, newcomers will have their minds blown, and that can only be a good thing.

The standout tracks on the album are easily the first single Heaven Alive, New Pin and the final tryptich. The single contains one of the cheekiest, bounciest bass-lines ever put to plastic and rolls along at a perfect head-nodding pace until the chorus takes off like a guitar-fuelled spaceship (a rockship). New Pin also has a perfect rolling tempo mixed with hypnotic, pulsing drums and multi-layered vocal and guitar effects that give the song a pleasantly poppy and relaxingly propulsive sound (although you're never gonna hear this on your local cheesy listening station).

The album closes with perhaps the most epic suite of songs since the Mars Volta's Francis the Mute. Three tracks clocking in at over 21 minutes comprise what the band have called the Church Suite. Featuring organs, angelic vocals, Stephen Hawkings' voicebox (presumably borrowed from Radiohead, another obvious but massive influence on the band) and a really amazing grasp of quiet-loud dynamics, Oceansize really out-do themselves with some of the most kinetic and inventive music of the year.

Combining all the best bits of prog and post rock, moulding them into actual songs and then rocking like giant fucking mountains of noise, Oceansize have made another perfect record for people bored with 4-minute pop songs disguised as rock music and who want a little more depth from an ear-pummeling.

Highly recommended.

www.oceansize.co.uk