Making friends among newer metal kids must be fairly straightforward these days.

Kid 1: Hey man. What sorta shit are you into?

Kid 2: Uh like, I hate metalcore?

Kid 1: Me too. Want to like hang and do stuff after school?

The following possibility cannot be ruled out though.

Smart kid: What's going on dude?

Low-hanging jeans wearing dumb kid: Usual shit. What's up with you?

Smart kid: Oh I got this new guitar, so I'm just busy playing the crap out of that.

Dumb kid: Cool. How many strings?

Smart kid: WHAT?! Six, ok?

Dumb kid: You should've gotten a seven string guitar man. My pal has one and it looks great.

<Smart kid punches Dumb kid>

I don't know if Prosthetic Records' Century is hip to those famous seven string staccato chug machines, but they seem to be doing things better than the scum of this much hated sub-sub-genre. With a load of bands trying to dig deeper into the 60s, 70s and the 80s for inspiration and ideas, Century looks up to as close as a few years ago, before metalcore started directly implying Pantera, At the Gates, Meshuggah and Machine Head rip-offs.

Century's tiny little corner of metal seems to be found somewhere in the sounds of the late 90s-early 00s throng of noisy, experimental, cross-genre loons like Cave-In, Coalesce, Bloodlet, Converge and Mastodon. Just more brutal and Ozzfest-ready. There is a lot of dissonant guitar riffs, quirky dynamics and often inherent melodies that make a standard riff a lot better, grooves without doing too much of the mosh thing and nothing at all as far as the (usually) mandatory Pantera type thing goes. Songs definitely try to be out of the ordinary and one always gets something more than expected as far as changes and breakdowns go, and I don't see this getting the chart topping sales that some of their genre colleagues are getting. Because some of this is actually not bad.

Having said all that, we have to get quickly to where this fails. Mainly the production, dear readers. Production for something like this ought to have been more organic, raw, dirty and in your face. This is as over-produced as any of the regular metalcore out there. Vocals are too effected and irritating, bass is too booming and guitars are too sterile and compressed. Drums, while having the best output among all the instruments, are too upfront in the mix and could've done with a more natural sound to it as well.

This could've been a good album but falls short due mainly to the production. Still a lot better than a lot of the bands that might come to your mind when you think of the word metalcore. Well, the best thing about Black Ocean is that it lasts only 33 minutes, so there's no harm giving it a shot really.

Label: Prosthetic Records

Year of Release: 2008

PS: The term metalcore was used five times in this article. Six. Argh.