OCEANO

Deathcore bands come and go. Many of them are great. Some are terrible. Few have the authority of OCEANO. Seven years have passed since the Illinois wreckers last released a studio album, and they still have an enviable reputation as resolute heavyweights. Even in highly fruitful times for this kind of music, "Living Chaos" is destined to stand out, because OCEANO stand out, and not just because of frontman Adam Warren's fearsome vocal chops. Deathcore has diversified in recent years, and countless new variations bode well for its future. This band beefed up and redefined the genre more than a decade ago, and now they are back with a brutal reminder.

The most striking thing about "Living Chaos" is how complete and cohesive it is. While many like-minded bands throw a ton of riffs at the wall to see what sticks, OCEANO have crafted this into a fluid 30-minute experience. From the start of opener "Wasted Life", the tone is atmospheric and darkly subversive. Warren, as ever, is a force of nature and one of metal's most expressive extremists: his guttural growls shake the speakers like sub-bass booms, as his comrades' artful violence twists and churns underneath. There are no wild departures from the deathcore norm, nor attempts to weave other styles into the mix, but OCEANO are so adept, so precise and so fucking heavy that these songs transcend comparisons to other bands and, instead, are simply and directly instructive of how to do this shit properly.

After "Wasted Life" lays down the deathcore law, recent single "Mass Produced" reveals how much OCEANO have grown in terms of using melody, while also delivering a vicious beating. Likewise, "Darkness Rising" and "Into The Flames" are both a-brim with grim, gothic tension and florid, theatrical embellishments, but both remember to revel in pure, myopic deathcore savagery. A more sophisticated variation on the same theme, "Wounds Never Healed" weaves chirruping electronics and desolate melodies into a grandiose melo-death melodrama and sounds much more crafted and classier than the average deathcore song. In contrast, "The Price Of Pain" is utterly berserk, fiendishly inventive and as crushing as anything on the first few OCEANO records.

"Living Chaos" winds down to a slightly premature close, albeit with its two greatest songs. The title track is another sophisticated, lightly blackened deathcore pile-up, and "Broken Curse" is an obnoxiously thrilling, slow descent into hell. Both point to OCEANO's imperious stewardship of a (sub)genre they helped to nurture and grow. Both will absolutely smash your face in. "Living Chaos" could easily have coped with a couple of extra songs, but there is something fantastic about an album that barely scrapes half an hour because it says all it needs to say within that time. This is the sound of heavyweights at work. Prepare to be flattened.