By Robert Gray

A man whose lyrical concepts are always ambitious in scope, THE OCEAN founder/guitarist Robin Staps has chosen a similar path for Heliocentric, the European outfit's fourth full-length outing.

“Heliocentric is an album that is basically a critique of modern history and religion, in particular Christianity, and different philosophies and also some personal angles. We wrote about the whole concept in a fairly chronological way; it starts with the Bible, the lyrics to the first song – 'Firmament' - being taken straight from the Book Of Genesis. We then proceed towards Galilei and Copernicus, who realized that Earth cannot be at the centre of the universe and that some of the teachings in the Bible must be wrong. Eventually we arrive at Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, the spearhead of modern atheism and natural science. That's the way we go about Heliocentric; every single song has its theme, although the album's main theme is the heliocentric world-view, the idea that the Sun is at the centre of the universe and not the Earth, and the effects that this discovery has had on Christian faith over the centuries.”

Apparently, Heliocentric's lyrical concept had brewed over quite a length of time. “I think it spoke to us for a long time. The first time I was really confronted with religion - and thinking about religion - was when I was living in the U.S. at the age of 16; I lived with a diehard Baptist / creationist family and had discussions with these people every day about the Earth being 5,000 years old, and the dinosaurs not really existing and all these kinds of things. Since then, I've studied philosophy and have been exposed to the whole thing in various regards over the last couple of years. It wasn't something that we really looked for, but was something that was there already, something I've been wanting to do an album about for quite awhile.”

Consistently mutating with each and every release, The Ocean continue to honour that tradition with Heliocentric. “It's different from anything we've done in the past, for sure” comments Staps. “But then again, that fact in itself shouldn't be too surprising because we've tried to do something different with every album we've done. Our first album (2001's Islands/Tides) was instrumental, and then our second album Fluxion (2004) had brutal death metal vocals. Aeolian (2005) had less orchestration than the album before it, and was a more typical metal album in a way. We then released Precambrian in 2007, which went back to the whole orchestral realm. We've been meandering around with all of our albums, which is what keeps it interesting for us and hopefully also for the people who listen to us. In that way, Heliocentric is completely different from anything we've done before too. It's a bit more mellow; there's a few songs on that album which have only piano and vocals as the main instrumentation, which is something we didn't have before. The overall feel of the album is still very reminiscent of our 2007 album Precambrian, in that there's a certain vibe to all of the songs and the music that I think is the same. Overall though, Heliocentric is a bit more of a mellow album, and the album that's coming out in the fall is centred more on our straightforward rocking side.”

As Staps mentioned, Heliocentric is so large in scope that a companion album will see the light of day in October: Anthropocentric. “Anthropocentric will continue that whole theme basically, and will be a bit more personal as well as dealing a bit more with creationism. Most of the lyrics for that album have not even been written at this point though; we've recorded most of the songs by now, but we're gonna start tracking vocals probably at the end of June. There's still lots of things that need to be written, so I don't want to go too much into detail about the thematic focus and the lyrical focus of that album, but Anthropocentric will basically be an album about religion.”

Heliocentric is out now through Metal Blade Records, whereas its companion record Anthropocentric is due for issue in October.

(Photos by ProgHippie.com)