Style: Ambient, pop, orchestral
Primary Emotions/Themes: Lost endlessly at sea, calming soundscapes with female voices guiding me onwards, peace, serenity with a hint of darkness, random interludes of pop rock
Thoughts: This album came out of nowhere. I stumbled upon it at a clearance event and listened to the first few tracks and was interested enough to pick it up.
Gloria and Dean have created quite the interesting album with Oceans of Time. A vast majority of the play time is spent on slow melodic ambience with female vocals floating across the music's surface. I would say a good 70 to 80 percent of the album falls within this description... and then there is the remaining parts.
In stark contrast to the slow ambience, the remaining tracks on Oceans of Time are beat driven pop-rock songs. They don't even seem to be fully fleshed out as they most often will just be a drum beat over some keyboards with Gloria singing a bit more forcefully than the ambient tracks. The melodies are sparse and don't offer enough of a hook to really draw me into them, despite the haunting nature of Olivia's excellent vocals.
This is really where the album loses me. The two styles are seemingly at odds with each other. They are in stark contrast and do not allow the album to get into any type of flow. It can't decide if it wants to be more ambient or more of a pop album and this dissociated identity ends up being the downfall of the album.
It's not that one is inherently better than the other, its that we got two separate albums or EP's here. If one side focused exclusively on ambient and the other on the pop sounds I think we would have the start of something really cool... but alas the track order can't get out of it's own way here. Just when I start getting into a groove with the pop, or into a relaxed state with the ambient the album switches gears again and I have to recalibrate myself. There's a good album in here somewhere, but the way that this is arranged currently that opportunity is lost.
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