New Music Friday is a tradition that my brother and I have shared since I left home to attend college. Every Friday (or as often as we are able), we trade albums that we believe will be worthy of discussion or debate. They don’t have to be new releases – just new to both parties. Sometimes we come across music that is just too interesting to keep to ourselves, and so I will share here, for you, dear readers, my impressions of a recent New Music Friday listening session.

This week’s selection: twin concept albums Heliocentric and Anthropocentric from The Ocean.

+

The Ocean (sometimes referred to as The Ocean Collective) is a heavy, sludgy, experimental metal band from Berlin. These two albums were released in April and September of 2010, respectively, and were my first real exposure to the band. Musically, they remind me of other acts like Between the Buried and Me (aggressive vocals and thoughtful lyrics), Ihsahn (spooky saxophone) and ISIS (sludgy riffs), as well as a dash of Hurt (piano and violin interludes) and, if you can believe it, a single track (“Ptolemy Was Wrong”) that reminds me of Coldplay’s “Fix You.”

But lyrically, they are like nothing I’ve ever listened to.

Both of these albums tackle the tricky subject of religion. I hesitate to say most (but let’s face it; I’d be right) metal bands out there attack Christianity with about as much poise and finesse as an underage drinker parking his mom’s Toyota in the produce section of the local Wegmans. They pose and posture and create such intense impressions of Godless heathens that they end up looking like laughable parodies of themselves (I’m looking at you, Cradle of Filth. And you, Dimmu Borgir – although I found your 2010 album Abrahadabra to be uncharacteristically thoughtful.).

The Ocean has instead constructed two albums that critique Christianity and indeed, faith in general, in an exceedingly grown-up manner. They don’t rail against God and Providence – they attempt to understand Him and His, and find out along the way that the Christian Argument doesn’t hold a lot of water.

It’s heavy stuff, and it’s certainly not for everyone. But no matter what your religious persuasions are, it remains a moral imperative, as far as I’m concerned, to step outside our comfort zones regularly and immerse ourselves in perspectives that differ from our own.

I think the point at which the lyrics started demanding my absolute and undivided attention was “Metaphysics of the Hangman,” from Heliocentric, as it was the first pointedly critical song on the album. Following it up is “Swallowed by the Earth,” which seems to be using the Old Testament flood as a condemnation of God’s oftentimes disturbing idea of morality. Bass riffs reminiscent of Tool abound here. But natural disasters are one of the go-to arguments against the “loving and caring god” theory. So is there nothing new here?

I’m not exaggerating when I say that tracks 9 and 10 – “The Origin of Species” and “The Origin of God” – are two of the most important songs I’ve ever heard in my life. I said earlier that these albums are thought-provoking on every single level. Let me explain one of these levels.

Screaming. There are thousands of bands in the world that utilize vocals like these; some better than others. But as I listened to these albums, I was, for the first time, debating the purpose of death metal vocals. Oftentimes the subject matter of a so-called “screamo” or “hardcore” or “black metal” – or any genre with “death” as a prefix or “core” as a suffix – doesn’t really gel with the vocal delivery. Mikael Akerfeldt of Opeth has always understood this; his music would not make the kind of sense it does if he screamed every single lyric. It seems to me that deep and guttural screaming needs to be used sparingly to mean anything at all; you can’t scream about everything and expect to be taken seriously. It would be like typing everything you ever write with caps lock on. No one wants to read that. No one will ever give you the time of day.

I am not, generally speaking, a fan of this vocal style. But there are a handful of artists I love that do it spectacularly well. Full disclosure: I found some of the death vocals on these albums to be distracting and unnecessary. That is, until I got to “The Origin of Species.” I feel that using such harsh vocals on this track go beyond a stylistic choice and become representative of a veritable crisis of faith; the narrator admits as the song opens that it’s difficult to imagine the world coming into being without an “engineer” and then begins to systematically dissect and defeat his own premise. Damn! That’s the most metal thing I’ve ever heard! How could he *not* be screaming until his throat bleeds? As he wrestles with his own interpretation of the world around him, he reminds us that no one on earth can begin to fathom the hugeness and complexity of the natural processes we pretend to be able to understand. Our lifetimes, after all, are just an instant. The universe will never know we were here.

But that’s not enough. It’s followed up with “The Origin of God.” I knew I was in for a ride as soon as I read the title.

“A prime mover only shifts the problem.” Holy hell, this is brilliant. Let’s face it: belief in God is a cop-out in so many ways. In grappling with our origins, mankind chooses to cleave to the belief that some man in the sky created us. Like Richard Dawkins (who they later quote), in Ben Stein’s 2008 documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, citing alien intervention in the creation of the human race.

But where did God come from? This track makes me realize that this question, which I’ve wondered idly about since I was a child, and have managed to be satisfied with evasions or non-answers, is actually the single greatest blow to religion, and probably the most important question anybody could ask.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been tempted toward a crisis of faith by metal before… and God knows how many metal bands there are out there who have tried… poorly. I quite simply am astounded at how well this band vocalizes the questions that have always been in the back of my mind, that I’ve never been able to ask, or didn’t know how to ask, and the answers to which I’ve always, on some level, feared.

And that was just the first disc. Deep breath.

The opening/title track of Anthropocentric is ferocious right out of the gate. And the screaming here represents…what? Triumph? Perhaps. A man finally come to terms with the questions he’s been asking. As I listened to this album, I was jotting down quotes that struck me particularly hard. This song has several of them:

“[Christianity's] legacy of fear and submissiveness prevails in many brave man’s heart and soul.”

“Condemned to inertia.”

He’s putting Christians in their place, isn’t he? And it makes me wonder if it isn’t the ultimate expression of narcissism to believe that mankind is sanctified and blessed and singularly important in this gigantic, unfathomable universe.

The airtight arguments continue in “The Grand Inquisitor II: Roots & Locusts”:

“Who would want to worship such a maker anyway?” In speaking to the notion that mankind was put on earth solely to worship Him (many Christians will tell you that this is our singular purpose), the singer asks the simple question: is such a being worthy of our praise?

“It is not God that I do not accept; it’s this world of God’s, created by God, that I cannot agree to accept.” An interesting turn here. There’s a faint suggestion that the notion of God is not at the root of the problems he describes, but instead he objects to the circumstances that God allows to exist and persist, despite the fact that He’d have us believe that He is loving and just. These are familiar arguments, but here they somehow feel fresh and novel and yes… haunting.

“Sewers of the Soul,” while musically not as interesting as other tracks, and in fact slightly tedious, has some of the most important lyrics: “Christianity has been from the beginning life’s nausea and disgust with life… merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as faith in ‘another’ or ‘better’ life.” This is brilliant. And it makes the image of millions of Americans getting up early and going to sit in pews among other believers every Sunday to get in God’s good graces and one day escape this mortal coil look so suddenly depressing, craven, and possibly insane. He reminds us that we ought to make every single second of this life count; it is, after all, the only life we can ever be sure we’ll have. Anything else is a gamble.

The main character in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, after expounding his convictions and moral beliefs and describing the truths and absolutes that define his life, is asked, “What about the afterlife?” His (paraphrased) answer: “This is the life I am living, right now. I am concerned with no other.” Something I’ve often thought about.

“The Almightiness Contradiction” is another headtrip and an awesome closer for these two albums, and another nearly airtight argument. “For if He knew everything, He could not do anything different from what He knows.” God is, then, either omnipotent or omniscient; He cannot be both.

I was reeling as the final notes played out. I don’t know if I’d say that my faith is actually shaken, but I know that this is the closest I’ve ever come. I find myself torn between two ideas:

(1) Unanswered questions are what life is all about. That’s why they call it “faith.” Faith is the name we give to filling in the gaps of our very imperfect knowledge with unquantifiable beliefs that, in truth, have no basis in reality and can never be tested or verified.

(2) Nothing about God adds up; belief in Him is not an answer in and of itself, and organized religion is a deeply imperfect, hollow, and ultimately meaningless exercise that gets us no closer to heaven than we already are.

There are profound and simultaneous feelings of joy and absolute horror to be found in reveling in such huge questions. And I suppose that in a weird way it takes the pressure off; these albums are a reminder of just how small we are, and that we don’t understand anything at all in the grand scheme of things. And maybe life’s ultimate goal is to learn to be okay with that.

Christians and agnostics alike learn different versions of humility: Christians humble themselves with the knowledge that there is a power greater than our comprehension, who set the worlds in motion. We are as nothing compared with Him. Agnostics are humble in the understanding that they (and humanity as a whole) are powerless to understand anything at all, from the origins of the universe to its innermost workings. The march of science and progress will provide some of these answers, but they remain comfortable, somehow, knowing that certainty is a myth.

In short, I don’t think I’ve ever been affected by lyrics quite this way before. The music itself ranges from bold and captivating to dull and uninspired, but at every turn it’s the lyrics that challenge and intrigue and inspire and infuriate me. I was born and raised in a Christian household, and even now it’s the faith with which I associate most closely.

So I think I have an answer to one of life’s important questions: why am I here? Because God allows me to be. To what end? I don’t have a damn clue.

Wonderment is asking questions. Faith is accepting imperfect answers to impossible questions. But without anything to challenge our faith, our answers don’t mean anything at all.