CENTURY

Somewhere between the crowded wastelands of post-rock and tech-metal, Pennsylvania co-op CENTURY has spent the last three years cobbling together this monolithic statement of purpose. It's ten tracks, all horsepilled together and blasted out of the speakers with overdriven guitar tone and harsh, cacophonous vocals. The band takes a kitchen-sink approach to modern-day metal, veering in seconds from menacing wide-open apocalypse chords to frantic squalls of riffing at teeth-rattling time signatures — an approach that shoots for dynamics, but ultimately just ends up fatiguing.

The frenetic nature of the songs doesn't allow any one part to sink in — thus, we have really cool atmospheric chords that, given freedom to drone on a little longer, would really set a tone. But they're cut off at the knees to make room for another skronking, stomping bit, which itself is ousted in favor of a driving 4/4 beat before it has a chance to make itself felt. The end result is sort of a Cliff's Notes of hipster metal, ten records' worth of good ideas stuck in a blender and set to puree.

"Black Ocean" is heavy stuff, metaphorically as well as literally — it's the kind of record destined to be respected at a safe distance by those who know how much work went into it. It's a spiritual descendent of all those BOTCH and CONVERGE records, but at the same time it's a prog-mosh treatise with recognizable DNA from early THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN and OPETH. Now and then it sneaks a little CAVE IN and NEUROSIS into its playlist, especially from "Monolith" onward, ending on a more droning post-rock note after kicking the whole thing down the stairwell for the first half of the record.

The trouble is, the whole thing is kinda flattened out by the guitar tone and white-noise roar of the vocals, to the point where all that manic action just caterwauls past the listener, with few landmarks to grab hold of. By trying to shoehorn in too much at once, CENTURY has made a record that, while creative and dripping with talent, ends up leaving only the impression of vague and indistinct chaos. "Black Ocean" ultimately sinks under the weight of its own ambition, losing good ideas in a mire of overcranked, overblown full-throttle blur.