Oceans of Slumber - "Where Gods Fear to Speak"
If you're crawling through Hell, fight to bring back the light
It’s time!
I haven’t had the opportunity to review Oceans of Slumber since creating this platform — the only direct comments I’ve made on their music which are posted anywhere here are from my 2022 Top 40 rundown,1 in which their album, Starlight and Ash, took third behind Porcupine Tree’s Closure/Continuation and Taylor Swift’s Midnights.
Oceans of Slumber has been one of my favorite discoveries of the last several years. I found them because Cammie Gilbert-Beverly was featured on Ayreon’s Transitus, and I found her vocals to be irresistibly haunting. (Note: because Gilbert’s surname is hyphenated, I’ll be referring to her by her maiden name to differentiate her from her husband, Dobber Beverly, the band’s drummer and the sole remaining original member).
And her performance as Oceans of Slumber’s frontwoman is no less enthralling.
But let me back up — the band’s whole arc feels important in discussing and digesting Where Gods Fear to Speak.
Oceans of Slumber is a Houston-based band which originally formed in 2011 as a Melodic Death Metal act. They released their debut album in 2013 with guitarist-turned-vocalist Ronnie Gates, but Gates then left the band in 2014. Gilbert had worked with the band already, providing background vocals, and they asked her to take over. Over the next few albums (Winter (2016), The Banished Heart (2018), and Oceans of Slumber (2020)), the band moved more toward Doom and Prog, sonically; really, if you have to give them strictly one label, it would be Doom Metal, as the Doom vibes are really the most consistent element across this portion of their discography. The Death elements, such as the harsh vocals, lingered, but dwindled with each subsequent album.
The band’s 2022 release, Starlight and Ash, was a huge stylistic leap, though, as noted and applauded by a plethora of reviewers (including myself). The Doomy vibes were still lurking deep in the compositions, but the album was, at its heart, a Southern Gothic affair in a Gothic Rock style with Progressive Doom Metal sensibilities.2
Starlight and Ash is still very high up in my list of favorites. It’s also a very accessible album for those looking to tiptoe their way into exploring Metal a bit here and there. Its cover of “House of the Rising Sun” is incredible, especially for the purpose of hearing a well-known song reimagined in this darker, more intense style. The album’s best track, though, was opener “The Waters Rising”.
All of the above was important to cover for this review because the band has reimagined themselves all over again for Where Gods Fear to Speak. While the band made what many, myself included, considered to be a huge leap forward in their evolution with Starlight and Ash, that album seems to only be a portion of how the band sees themselves, and Where Gods Fear to Speak feels like an attempt to take their first five albums and compile their sound into a cohesive sum.
It’s all here. The album opens with its six-and-a-half minute title track, which is filled with Doomy vibes, Gothic lyrics, a Proggy structure, and Death blast beats.
On top of it all, Gilbert debuts her harsh vocals as accenting lines. If you want to give the song a listen, the chorus starts at about the 1:20 mark. That’s all the same vocalist.
Gilbert was asked about her decision to learn how to perform harsh vox in an interview with Dark Art Conspiracy, and she goes on a bit of a rant, which was, honestly, great to read (even if it appears the publication shoved the recording through an automated transcription service and slapped the output up with no editorial oversight).
Another key element of the band’s sound is found in their disdain for production gloss. As Beverly states in an interview with No Clean Singing:
I think people are disillusioned about how records are made and how simply they believe a record can be done. It is easy to say that you can make a record at home, but there are also plenty of people who can’t match live what they present on a recording. Our band sounds exactly like we do in a studio, on stage and in person, and that is what we want. I hate watching bands with copious amounts of production magic and their live performance sounds nothing like their record.
The band’s approach to recording is, thus, to do most of it in a single, live take, with limited production elements added afterward. This gives their music a raw edge, and it’s particularly noticeable on Where Gods Fear to Speak.
What’s particularly incredible about that is that the band also achieves a cinematic scope with damn near every song on the album — rising and falling, building into a frenzy and then cooling back off. It gives each song, and the album at-large, the sense of life, of breathing. This is difficult to do, generally, and outright impossible in most genres, as you need songs that run on the long side. Where Gods Fear to Speak’s ten tracks total 56 minutes in play time, and only two songs (“Wish” and “The Given Dream”) are shorter than five minutes; the longest track, “Don’t Come Back from Hell Empty Handed” runs for eight-and-a-half.
And all of this is with flawless chemistry and coordination, which is a bit of a feat, as the band lost both of its guitarists (Jessie Santos (lead) and Alexander Lucian (rhythm)) after Starlight and Ash. The two new guitarists (Alex Davis (lead) and Chris Kritikos (rhythm)) have only had a year to find their footing within the band, but they sound like they’ve been there all along. Major credits to both of them. Kritikos is also doubling as a keyboardist in place of Mat Aleman, who left the band before Starlight and Ash released, but was included in its credits.
I can’t not give Davis and Kritikos their recognition here. They deserve it.
I will say that my favorite version of Oceans of Slumber, though, is the incredibly dark and moody version. That was basically the entirety of Starlight and Ash, but we only get passing moments of it throughout Where Gods Fear to Speak. On one hand, it’s because this album is ultimately much more complex; on the other, I just don’t love the harsh vocals. I don’t hate them, but I prefer Gilbert’s clean vocals — they were the original draw for me, after all.
But the album also runs deeper than just the songs it contains — as one might hope or expect with an album with such a heavy title;3 it is a concept album. There does seem to be a (very loose) narrative contained here, but it isn’t the easiest to follow, though the sort of dystopian atmosphere comes through in both tone and lyrics.
The crux of the album’s thematic throughline, though, comes from their roots. Based in Texas, the band finds themselves entrenched in a state full of evangelicals. That dogma has an enormous impact on their daily lives, regardless of whether they subscribe to that faith. And with the push for Christian Nationalism which has grown over the last five decades, and the subsequent influence on politics and policy, the band has some thoughts on how this all plays out.
The album makes a statement of purpose in its opening track, and this is stated at the end of the first verse, then repeated as the song’s final lines:
We know we must make a choice
With hearts unyielding, we will face, not fear the night
Defying the gods, we will find our own light
The rest of the album follows along with motifs of resistance, clinging to those you care about while in mutual exile, and finding and creating one’s own morality and light. The experience of breaking free of overbearing dogma, of spotting the flaws and hypocrisies you’ve been trained to ignore, has become incredibly common in the last several decades.4
This throughline effectively runs through the end of track 9, “The Impermanence of Fate”. The album’s final track, “Wicked Game”, is a cover of Chris Isaak’s iconic song from 1989 (because Oceans of Slumber always includes a cover on their albums). There’s an interesting story behind this cover, too, as it wasn’t the cover that they originally intended to include. Gilbert reveals in that Dark Art Conspiracy interview that the band originally intended to cover Roy Orbison’s “Crying”.
The notable feat here, though, is that the recording of “Wicked Game” which made the album was only their fifth take. They had two hours of studio time left, had not practiced this song at all. They winged it and made it work. They recorded the whole process, but I’ve only found a 19-second short of it on YouTube.
I admit that I am mildly disappointed by the album. It didn’t go quite in the direction that I was hoping for; but that doesn’t mean that I’m unhappy with what Oceans of Slumber have delivered. There’s a ton of artistry on display here, and I do believe that they were ultimately successful in what the album set out to achieve.
Rating: Blue
Which I posted up in June of 2023 for the sake of continuity and having an example of what I was building toward for any readers who happened to follow me before 2023 ended. I needed content, so the beginning of this blog was just a couple of weeks of me reposting reviews I’d already posted on Facebook.
Even when an artist changes styles, it doesn’t change their roots or their methodologies. The genre they’ve moved from is still going to influence the music they’re making in their new genric home. See Taylor Swift’s gradual transition from Country to Pop. Red was poppy, but it was still very Country. She didn’t really begin to shed the Country influences until 1989.
Gilbert was asked about the album’s title in her interview with Dark Art Conspiracy. Specifically, because it does beg the question of “where do gods fear to speak”? Naturally, she hedged at first and stated that it’s really up to each listener to decide for themselves, then gave her own take on it:
“…for me, ‘Where Gods Fear To Speak’ is like, in the face of suffering, and it’s often easy for the onlookers to be like, I pray. I take hope, and I lament over their losses. Still, I know that my God protects me; as the onlooker, it’s easy for you to say that, but what do you say for that person in the midst of suffering and turmoil? Where is God for them, and how have they been delivered?”
Very likely, I think, because of the push for political influence.