Obiat are back. After first making their mark on the London scene having decanted from Poland some twenty years ago, it’s fair to say that they went a bit quiet. There is a fair old gap between their last release ‘Eye Tree Pi’, and ‘Indian Ocean’, the thirteen year difference not being something that can blamed on a recent global pandemic that interrupted so many other recording schedules. Why the break, I cannot say; that’s something for the band to address should they care to do so. However, so long between releases should surely lead to some rustiness, maybe some clunkiness as unused musical muscles are flexed after so long lying dormant?
Wrong! ‘Ulysses’ opens the album with a confidence and complexity that raises a stiff middle finger in the direction of any naysayers, layering keyboards atop thudding riffs, looping rhythms and ethereal harmonised vocals. Hell, even some pipes are seamlessly inserted into the musical flow. The massive musical odyssey continues apace, or rather at a slower pace, with ‘Eyes and Soul’, the dreamy, almost hypnotic delivery of the opening ebbing into a gentle, stark stripped back middle before the guitar work transitions from plucked notes to massive chords to keep the listener hooked to the ever evolving sound. ‘Acid Wake’ delivers more of the same, in so far as it doesn’t stick to a single pace, instead starting with THC drenched stoner riffs that trip into the realms of the gently psychedelic before a surprisingly sudden cut off; I genuinely thought this was a track that would be faded away over a long lingering stretch, so I was happy to be proven wrong.
‘Nothing Above’ adds yet another dimension with guest vocals adding a dreamy Gothic flavour to the song, as well as a wailing saxophone that harkens back to the days of Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side’ heyday. How a band that is a four piece of guitar, bass, drums, and vocals will pull off such a nuanced track live without a platoon of supporting musicians on stage is a feat I’d like to see. Compared to the delicacy of what proceeded it, ‘Sea Burial’ is almost a simple bludgeoning, a riff that could have harvested sorrow back in the eighties lending an altogether harder edge to the track, a massive contrast to the initially dreamlike piano lead follow up ‘Ad Meliora’ (“towards better things”, as the Latin O-level I passed nearly 40 years ago allows me to translate), a dream that mutates over the length of the track into a harsh nightmare.
All that came before leads up to the epic ‘Beware The North Star’, a huge sprawling number that could be the centre piece of an Obiat live show; nearly four minutes in, where the average disposable chart earworm has long since finished and evaporated into a forgettable puff of mediocrity, this track is barely past its gentle opening, raging dissonant riffs then screaming forth their anger, the music ebbing briefly again before it swells and crashes, as if the listener was momentarily sheltered in the eye of a storm on the titular sea of the album title. The whole is then rounded out by ‘Lightness of Existence’, a performance piece of spoken word and sound effects that surely reflects the hours that Obiat must have spent chilling to the sound of Hawkwind over the years.
With ‘Indian Ocean’ Obiat have shown they are not only back with a high, but also a band that can’t be pigeon holed into a single category. Doom, Prog, Stoner, Psyche, and just plain hard rock are all called upon to form this album, each element subtly supporting the other rather than jarring or distracting from the whole. This is no mean feat, and one that will require considerable skill to recreate live, and having listened to this album a fair few times, these gents could well have the chops to pull it off.
(8.5/10 Spenny)
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