The Ocean @ On the Rocks, Helsinki
December 4th, 2024
I still remember my first encounter with The Ocean back in 2007 – to be more precise, with their freshly released album Precambrian whose spectacular multi-layered cover made me curious enough to ask the record shop owner to let me have a listen. A few bars of the first track were enough: I bought the album on the spot and been a fan ever since. Amazing artwork and paleontology-inspired album themes have remained trademarks of the Berlin-based collective of musicians. The creative team around guitarist/songwriter Robin Staps has been changing perpetually over the years, so the announcement that the current mini-tour was titled „End of an Eon“ to signify the discontinuation of the present line-up was quite a surprise. A rather unwelcome one if it means that the band‘s second-longest-standing member, charismatic vocalist Loïc Rossetti, is about to part with his fellows – and all the more reason to be grateful that these final few shows included a gig in my hometown.
Doubtlessly the tour moniker also referred to the musical content; the evening summarized the most recent album trilogy, which is inspired by our ongoing geologic eon. The first part was last year‘s Holocene played in full, the second contained the highlights of Phanerozoic I: Paleozoic (2018) and Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic/Cenozoic (2020). The compact venue was packed and had no photo pit, but even from front center it would hardly have been possible to get proper photos of the band members who were mostly hidden by smoke and backlight. Instead, the visual centerpiece of the show was the mesmerizing animation of the album artwork. The sound was crystal clear and the dynamic range of this versatile band was presented in its full dramatic splendor. Apparently keyboard player Peter Voigtmann has already left the band, but in his stead two guests filled in on trumpet and trombone, fitting seamlessly into the whole. Loïc sang passionately and performed with unrestrained abandon; his growls can be frightening but his clean voice is one of the most comforting I know. And fortunately nobody had told him that crowdsurfing is usually forbidden in Finland.
The division in two sets with a short break in between worked well, since Holocene is a tight-knit, easily accessible album well suited to be played live as a whole, whereas Phanerozoic I&II are more complex and meandering. Maybe the former is supposed to be a kind of epilog to the preceding duo, given that on the geologic time scale the present holocene is only the latest epoch of the Cenozoic, less than twelve thousand years of the entire 500+ million year Phanerozoic. But be that as it may, although the second set had slightly less „hit potential“ than the first, there was never a noticeable slack in audience participation. The main set culminated in the strobo-illuminated „Pleistocene“ but the band came soon back for an encore, rounding off the outstanding gig with emotional renditions of „Triassic“ and „Jurassic/Cretaceous“. Whatever the future holds in store for The Ocean, I wish them all the best for it and look forward to the next eon of this band.
