OCEAN

ELOY's Ocean is a fantastic meandering space-rock album that perfectly captures it's subject matter musically. The album is based upon the tale of Poseidon and Atlantis, it's made quite clear obviously by the names of the tracks and there are various voice over parts detailing the myth (in a thick German accent mind you, which I personally love).

The album starts with my personal favourite song 'Poseidon's creation' in a brooding fashion before ascending into a flowing space rock groove for a while followed by a mellowed out storytelling section before resting on a slow space rock groove to end. This is space rock at it's best. The rest of the songs follow in similar fashion - fat German space rock grooves, storytelling, suspenseful building before the inevitable climax. My only major gripe with the album is that it moves a bit slow sometimes and it does get a tad boring and repetitive in parts which is what inevitably keeps it back from masterpiece status in my book.

The instrumentation on this album is fantastic, the production is great all the instruments are nicely separated and perceivable without it sounding overproduced. The songs mainly rely on synths and organs to create a sort of backdrop or sound-scape if you will and they are probably my favourite part of the album and they give the other instruments a lot of room to move. The drums from the get go are top notch stuff, I especially enjoy the flanged krautrock style hi-hat sound on 'Decay of the Logos'. The bass is nice and fat and contributes some nice grooves and is well up in the mix, which is a great thing to see. The guitar work likewise exemplary, I really enjoy prog style guitar that is very calculated and musical whilst not being overbearing, merely occupying it's place and contributing.

Overall this is a great album recommended to anyone into spaced out prog but it isn't quite good enough to earn a 5 star rating.