× Make your TwitLonger posts ad-free For just £1 a month, you can support TwitLonger directly and remove ads from your posts

Click here to make your TwitLonger posts ad-free.

20 Years of Ocean Machine: Biomech

Very rarely, an album will come along that, when you listen to it for the first time, it completely changes the way you view music. This album takes you to a very dark place when listening to it, then when it's over, makes sure to bring you back to reality with a different worldview. Devin Townsend's Ocean Machine: Biomech was that album for me. From the first seconds of Seventh Wave, with a sample talking about the beauty of Earth, and lyrics reminding you that "you're never alone even when you're alone", to the final fadeout, and subsequent surprise ending (which I won't spoil if you haven't listened to the album before), Ocean Machine was in a way, transcendent.



I first heard of Ocean Machine: Biomech from Devin's SYL stuff, and after listening to songs such as "Shitstorm" and "Oh My Fucking God", two of the heaviest songs in existence, listening to a progressive/ambient/rock/metal album was quite different and came almost as a shock to me (imagine how shocking listening to Ghost immediately after Alien was now!). Of course, the surprise ending was spoiled in advance by an entry on Devin's TVTropes page, but otherwise, I was going into an album completely blind. By the time track 2, Life, ended, I was hooked on the album and wanted to hear the entire thing.



Ambient music was never really something I was interested in, just because I could never find an ambient album that really hooked me in. So, when Hide Nowhere ended, and Sister started, I wasn't very optimistic about introducing ambient elements into the album, but I gave it a chance. I ended up liking the way that the ambient elements were worked into the songs, striking a perfect balance between them and the progressive feel of the next few songs, particularly in Voices in the Fan and Greetings. Regulator came as a much more straight-forward metal song, albeit much softer than any of the SYL stuff I was used to. However, I wasn't prepared for what came next.



In my opinion, the best part of this album is what is referred to by several people as the "Ocean Machine Trilogy", which consists of Funeral/Bastard/The Death of Music, 3 songs that lead in to each other, could all make a legitimate case for being the best songs in Devin's entire discography, and take up an entire half hour of the album's running time. Funeral is a more depressing song (given the title), about a schoolmate of Devin who was killed walking home by a group of kids who wanted his hat. Bastard is the heaviest of the three, but it is still quite dark with quite bleak lyrics about feeling lost in a big city that saps the joy out of everyone there, Devin's vocal delivery adding to the hopelessness, and a simplistic beat behind it that speeds up at about the 6 minute mark. To finish it up, The Death of Music is a bit of an oddity. There's no guitar, bass, or drums anywhere, and the only rhythm is provided by electronic instruments that manage not to break from the tone of the album. Devin's vocals start off very whispered, yet gradually grow louder and more epic, and by the 4-minute mark, you think Devin has reached the pinnacle of epicness while he's singing "It's like a death becomes musical", but it goes back into the whispered vocals for a bit, before repeating "Don't die on me, don't go away. When I need you here in my need" 4 times, gradually getting louder and more emotional, leading into the final vocal section, where symphonic elements start showing up, making it the most grand and huge section of the trilogy.



Finally, there is a bonus track that wraps the entire album up, Thing Beyond Things. This song manages to sound very calm and relaxing, almost like a song you would listen to with your girlfriend on a beach, but the lyrics are about keeping a very personal secret, or at least I think that's what they're about. It's a track that could make you cry, due to it sounding so beautiful and the lyrics being so emotional. Don't get too relaxed, though, because as the song fades out, there's a nice little surprise after a bit of silence, waiting for you to be caught unaware. Ocean Machine: Biomech is an album that still manages to sound timeless after all these years, and I'm glad that it's turning 20 years old today, so I finally have an excuse to write all this down and be able to post it. I'll provide some links to legitimate streams of the album, in case you are interested in listening to it and want to support Devin's amazing work.



Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/7hjBb9Z7o4KO5AMYi5xm66



Last.fm: https://www.last.fm/music/Devin+Townsend/Ocean+Machine:+Biomech



Amazon Music: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0164970N0/?tag=lastfmmp3-20

Reply · Report Post