Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic I Cenozoic

Renowned for their sprawling concept albums, German music collective The Ocean returns with part two of the Phanerozoic record they released in 2018. Steeped in the post-hardcore/sludge band’s high atmosphere and progressive arrangements, Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic picks up where Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic left off and continues The Ocean’s exploration of geologic eras that began on 2007’s Precambrian. “Initially, I think I got there by trying to visualize our music when I was writing, and I always ended up with these images of prehistoric landscapes and streams of lava—which actually ended up on the cover of Precambrian,” guitarist and founder Robin Staps tells Apple Music. “I also studied geography, so I always had an interest from that angle as well. At one point, it just made sense to combine these two interests.” Below, Staps guides us through the most eventful of eons.
Triassic “This goes back to our first-ever visit to India in 2014 when we watched an incredible band called The Manganiyar Seduction. It was basically an orchestra of 40 or 50 tablas players, flute players, and a conductor that was directing them in this weird shamanist way. They were sitting in a strange structure, almost like boxes, and there were curtains in front of each box, and this conductor was telling each musician when they had to start playing, and then the curtains would open and three tablas players would start playing, and then the curtains would close and then someone else would play. It was this very theatrical performance, but it was really cool and very weird, eerie music for our ears. When we started writing this record, it came to the surface a little bit. We also recorded some Armenian flute players for this track when we were in Yerevan for a few days, and that contributes a little bit to the overall vibe.”
Jurassic | Cretaceous “This is the centerpiece of the Mesozoic half, the first half of the record, and it is probably one of the most complicated tracks I ever wrote. It’s almost 14 minutes long, and I think I started writing it five years ago. Conceptually, it talks about what happened at the end of the Cretaceous, when a giant asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. This is the red thread that goes through the Phanerozoic records—this impending collision on a planetary scale and how we deal as individuals with the idea that the end is nigh. The lyrics also make a lot of reference to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia film, especially the scenes in that movie when a woman is talking to her boy and trying to take his fear away. We’ve also got Jonas Renkse from Katatonia on this one—it’s the second time we had him guest on a track.”
Palaeocene “Palaeocene is the first era of the Cenozoic. It's a short and heavy track. This one has guest vocalist Tomas Liljedahl, formerly Tomas Hallbom, from the Swedish band Breach, who has already guested on three of our previous records. They were really ahead of their time, and I think this track has a really sick Breach vibe to it with almost black-metal-ish guitar chords and this raw, driving punk-rock energy.”
Eocene “This was a bit of an accident. The track is based on the guitar pattern that already appears in ‘Jurassic | Cretaceous.’ The way it happened was that I was playing that part in the rehearsal space and Paul [Seidel], our drummer, all of a sudden started playing something completely different over it. So a new song was born from just that moment of fooling around, basically. There’s a lot of cross-references, musically and lyrically, between the individual tracks on this record. But this is a very unusual Ocean track because it was written out of a jam session. That almost never happens.”
Oligocene “This is a track that Paul wrote, and it wasn’t supposed to be on the record at first, but we decided to add it when we put the song order together because we needed a transitional track to inaugurate the quieter and calmer songs on the second half of the record. It’s also an instrumental track. It’s largely electronic, although we did record real drums, but they were played by our synth player, Peter [Voigtmann]. He’s a kick-ass drummer as well as a synth player.”
Miocene | Pliocene “It’s a song that also could’ve been a single—it’s quite catchy and has a really interesting vocal hook. It's the idea that things happen over and over again in infinite time and space—that time is not linear, but cyclical. You can apply that to the great time scales we talk about on the album, but also to your individual lifespan—déjà vu experiences or not learning from our mistakes and falling into the same traps over and over again.”
Pleistocene “The Pleistocene is mostly known for its ice ages, which is adequately represented in this track by a black metal part, which is the first in the history of the band, I think. It's just something that happened here that felt right, and we've always wanted to allow ourselves to do anything musically. It's a track that starts off in a very different place—very quiet—and then ends in this really heavy blast-speed part. It’s a track about depression, basically. The lyrics are about a person losing direction in life, and that’s what we wanted to visualize with the video for this song, too.”
Holocene “This is another track that Paul wrote. It’s a very unusual Ocean track based on a very repetitive structure, dominated by synths and heavy electronics, which Paul and Peter wrote and developed together. There’s almost no guitars in it—just a little bit. Also, Paul is singing on this song, and it’s the first time that he sings on an Ocean record. Most of the lyrics of the song are taken from other places on the record, but repeated here in a totally different context. When I say repeating, I don’t mean just copy-paste. It’s always with different phrasing and over a different musical idea. We did that to intentionally reinforce and reiterate the idea of eternal recurrence.”