Ocean

Restraint might not be the first word that comes to mind when you think heavy metal, the domain of dragons and dwarves, extreme garishness and ghastliness, and vocalists and instrumentalists that love for their skills to shine in the spotlight. And it would seem that restraint falls even further from the picture when considering a band like Portland, Maine’s Ocean. The two tracks on their brilliant 2008 album, Pantheon of the Lesser, are 36 and 23 minutes long. How is that anything but excess?

But Ocean’s slow-moving, meticulous metal is minimalist in approach even if maximal in volume and length. The guitars move in crisp, efficient tidal motions, with chords and notes given more respect and room than most bands give entire progressions. The drums, too, move deliberately, giving each thunderous snare or cymbal crack maximum impact, while the bass pans beneath it all in pained, painstaking drones. Above it all, frontman Candy occasionally growls mysterious imprecations, his words gnarled and twisted, as though they’re pushing upward through the Earth’s crust. Moving chords with the same pace that the Earth must move its mountains, Ocean makes every second of their careful, exacting compositions count. Each eventual climax is a sustained triumph.

Very few doom metal bands still hold sway or evince imagination: Khanate, perhaps Ocean’s closest stylistic cousin, has been done for years, and Sunn O))) pushes continually away from metal and into deep avant realms. But this four-piece—fittingly, one of the sole heavy bands on the fecund New England experimental outlet Important Records—proves that there’s still energy and vitality in slow motion, a feat whose difficulty should be lost on no listeners.

Ocean will make a rare appearance at Hopscotch. —Grayson Currin