Release Date: September 8th 2017

Label: Unsigned

Website: None available

Facebook: www.facebook.com/beingasanocean

Twitter: www.twitter.com/beingasanocean

Rating:



It’s been just over two years since Being As An Ocean dropped their self-titled record, making our wait from then until the release of ‘Waiting For Morning To Come’ our longest so far for new music from the Californian collective, and that period was a turbulent one for the quartet.

Indeed, things from the outside were seemingly at an all time high. The band moved from their long-time label home of InVogue Records over to Equal Vision Records, and the little drips of new music in the form of ‘Dissolve’ and ‘OK’ in the run up to a set release of June 9th 2017 kept fans happy. The date came, and went, the band tweeted out telling fans to aim questions directly to Equal Vision directly as they “have the finished album”, and even up until the time of writing this review, there’s been no official word as to why.

Three months later, the band confirmed that they’d left Equal Vision, bought the completed album back from the label to legally do what they wish with it, and, opting to proceed with an independent self-release route a couple of weeks later, morning finally came.

Getting down to brass tax, ‘Waiting For Morning To Come’ is certainly not your standard Being As An Ocean record. Over their past two releases, the band have been cautiously dipping their toe into involving and weaving electronics into their work, though more as a supportive backdrop to their main focal point of emotive and poetic post-hardcore. They’ve now bravely dove head first deep into exploring this ocean of possibilities, with electronics no longer being just the backbone, but now the main body of the instrumentation here.

After some solemn piano keys gently tap us in with intro ‘Pink & Red’, first track proper ‘Black & Blue’ shows this new path that they’ve taken in its full glory. There’s nothing overly complex or in-your-face being presented here; Joel Quartuccio guides us in nice and easy with almost Imogen Heap-tinged vocals before he begins yelling and the whole band enter the frame. Michael McGough takes control of its chorus, and his soaring cleans along with the prominent percussion and electronics wrap us up snug and have us sat comfortably.

‘Glow’ is similar to a degree, except there’s a far more pulsating and vibrant shot of a near distorted reverb being blasted in its chorus, acting as a replacement for the crunching guitars the band used to incorporate and involve in its place, and it brings a lush and living colour into the record nice and early. Later track ‘Thorns’ holds similar qualities; its near dubstep attributes and rolling drums effectively making it the heaviest thing that the band have put out this time around, and surprisingly its Justice sample slots in nicely.

As stand-alone tracks, these along with a few other pickings, including the aforementioned singles released in the lead up to the album’s final unveiling, showcase that Being As An Ocean are able to expand, evolve, and adapt, and it suits them. However, as a whole album, ‘Waiting For Morning To Come’ is an ultimately disappointing experience, and a vapid and hollow listen.

At 14-tracks deep, it really says something when only half of the entire record (yep, only 7 tracks) can be considered full songs with an entire ensemble; the rest of the release consists of introductions, interludes, and, to be frank, self-indulgent attempts at trying to demonstrate artistry that just fall flat.

That’s not to say that instrumentals should be instantly discounted, but they need to serve a purpose. There’s nothing wrong with bridging tracks to one another to convey a message or an emotion, but nothing is being conveyed here through these fillers. In detriment to the record, they leave it sounding lifeless, incomplete and unfinished, and it leaves a bitter speculation that perhaps Equal Vision‘s reservations may have resided in feeling the same way.

Almost every song is preceded and followed by one of these vacant bridges. It’s clear that the band have employed and implemented these as aids to the album listening experience, and, in an ever-increasingly digital age of convenience, creating a record that warrants the attention for the listener and fans – both existing and potential – to sit there and invest their time to listen to it from start-to-finish again and again is vital. ‘Waiting For Morning To Come’ has very clearly made an effort to achieve that, but hasn’t even scratched the surface of its intention.

‘eB tahT srewoP ehT’ is indisputably the biggest culprit of wasted play time on this entire record. Spelling backwards ‘The Powers That Be’, the track is literally a fully composed and recorded song reversed. Some may argue that this is artistic, different, and interesting, but it’s not. It’s just not. It’s irritating, stupid, pointless, and the fact that you have to go out of your way to reverse it back into its correct format to obtain another song, which honestly sounds better not reversed (listen), is just infuriating.

Being As An Ocean‘s tactics and efforts to create an epic journey on this record have instead resulted in the complete opposite. They don’t make the record sound artistic. They don’t make it sound cinematic. They don’t make it sound grandiose. They’re clearly implying depths of sheer emotion, but we’re just not being taken there.

Instead, with ‘Waiting For Morning To Come’, we’re constantly left waiting for the next song to come, waiting for the grand statement to come, waiting for the redundant interludes to end, and at the end of it all, it seems from 2015 we were waiting for a disappointing record that shows wasted potential.

Written by Zach Redrup (@zachredrup)