WE ARE THE OCEAN
w/ Giants
Barfly, Camden
19th September 2012
Giants have been gigging for sometime and have firmly established themselves as a band to be watched with their latest effort, the mini-album, ‘These Are The Days‘. The Essex band storm the stage with Ed Parker, their highly energetic front man, leading the charge. The riffs are fast and heavy, the bass shakes your teeth, and this mash up of skate punk and hardcore blast your brains out of your ears (but in a good way, if you can imagine that?). You can see that hardly anyone in this room had heard of them before tonight, but one thing is for sure, they won the crowd over completely by the time they left the stage. They are definitely ones to keep an eye on.
Then it’s time for the headline act to take to the stage. We Are The Ocean have lost a vocalist since I last saw them, and I’m not quite sure what to expect from the live performance. The band start with ‘Machine’, a solid new track, and the crowd loves it. However, the set comprises the old for the new, and although the bands new screamless line-up is as polished and as slick as Simon Cowells hair, yet there is definitely something missing…
The real problem lies in the fact that the new material is lacking edgey excitement and anxiety. You wait for the songs to reach their heights and then burst through a barrier and stand balls out in front of you, but they don’t. Now that’s not to say the performance is bad, in fact the band are great, it’s the simple fact that they’re not We Are The Ocean anymore. They’ll be people wanting to guillotine me for saying this, but if it was another band you couldn’t complain about the evening. It’s when they stand they’re old material up against their new that you see a sort of sleek and polished decline, and the fact they’re missing that raw, rasping voice in certain parts to push the songs into the stratosphere is noticed.
Like I said, if this was any other band and you’d have had me singing praises. I just have such fond memories of other live shows of theirs that this one was more of a damp squib. Regardless the new line-up works as a polished unit, its just not We Are The Ocean of old.
Words: JJ Nattrass
Photos: Alex Langworthy
A word from the promoter before the show lets us know that this event is a couple of tickets away from selling out. It seems they completely underestimated something along the way as we get into the upstairs room to find it at possibly the fullest I’ve ever seen. Even for support act Cerebral Ballzy, it’s a bit of a strain to get any sort of view at all. And forgive us, but we don’t fancy being too near the front given both bands’ reputations for hurling objects (and themselves) into the crowd as well as a tendency to puke / spit / generally emit bodily fluids when on stage. Despite being confined to a small square near the back of the venue, it’s still possible to enjoy Cerebral’s exuberant take on old-skool punk rock and hardcore as they barrel through upbeat songs about “drinking til you puke”, “not having enough money to pay for the tube” and “girls”. It’s certainly obvious these guys are basically kids but that’s what makes their reinvention of the genre so potent and fun.