THE OCEAN
Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic/Cenozoic METAL BLADE
Post-metal palaeontologists hit a new creative peak.
If anyone still needs to check The Ocean’s prog credentials, their eighth album includes a 13-minute track (Jurassic/Cretaceous) that explores the end of Earth’s Mesozoic era, when an asteroid hit the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico and wiped out the dinosaurs and almost all life on the planet. The song itself is every bit as vast in scope as one would hope, but also markedly different in tone and execution from the dark, brutal material on this album’s predecessor, Phanerozoic I.