Review Summary: i don't know where i am but i'm not sure i want to leave
The only real way to discuss an ambient record is to discuss how it makes you
feel. These are not songs you talk about with your friends and they’re not really even songs you remember. I can’t recall which track here tentatively steps out from the rickety front porch and into the rain through its gentle piano melody. Does it matter? Probably not. I still feel this music, as it inhales and exhales, even after I’ve moved on to a different album.
And that piano, my god. It’s contribution to the soundscapes on this record are beautifully and uniquely human, like it’s charting a person’s life as it pertains to the world around it. In
Dying Breaths II, the melody trickles down across the theatre of emotions that flash in and out in the seconds before a passing. There’s disbelief and then there’s hope and then there’s this scrambling fear and then there’s acceptance. It all gets dragged to the ocean floor and the eyes close forever.
The Sky! is an epilogue, the most necessary of after-credits scenes. Inexorable and entirely canon to
Ocean Grave’s universe, the piece seems to detail a life after death wherein the soul is the only form that succeeds in making it above the waves. I’ve listened to this song a lot already, with love; it’s one of those moments that you can place yourself in the middle of as if it’s a strong current. The reverb-soaked chords are utterly unremitting, pushing up and up as they run through slight variations of the same theme. It’s paradoxical, really, that the keys are played into the ground in order to part the clouds for a final minute floating in orbit, but that’s what it does.
The Sky! works so gorgeously because it is contingent on what comes before it – both playing off and paying off the rest of the record with a vertiginous swell of melody, validating all the waves of blaring pipe-organ and quivering strings.
Those last two paragraphs, by way of even existing, are inconsequential. They are of an analytic heart and not a sentimental one. In truth, I loved the rain today. I felt in an introspective mood and I felt acutely aware of adjacent worlds not yet explored. I should probably go and do that, but there are currently passages of
Ocean Grave floating around in my room. They tie it together well.
