I don’t think I’ve ever personally beat up on Oceano. I’ve definitely attacked their chosen genre and I’ve lobbed bombs at many of the band’s contemporaries, but the alpha and omega of deathcore has never really crossed my desk… until the iPad.
See, to promote their new album, Contagion, they had a contest. What could the winner look forward to? A free cd and shirt? Maybe a signed guitar? Nope, a motherfucking iPad. Now I’m not typing this on a Smith-Corona, nor am I calling my parents on rotary phone, but come on, what in the fuck does a $500 Scarlet Letter of yuppie scum have to do with extreme metal? Why not just let the lucky winner flip through the latest copy of Sky Mall and pick out their favorite bluetooth foot massager? I understand record labels need new ways to get people to pick up albums but this seems so incredibly antithetical to what metal has at least facilely promoted since its inception.
Contagion “…is about a government-born virus that becomes an epidemic and spreads chaos amongst the population” which I interpret as the band reaching out to its audience with a treatise on the corruptibility of our leaders and their mercenary tendencies. Those who we place in power too often are swayed by what they see as nation-state exceptionalism, which leads to a zero sum game. This myopic outlook leads to creating unspeakable evils which, with few necessary variables, can quite easily turn against their creators and the civilians that, in the ultimate irony, were the ones who set about their own destruction by the seemingly equitable act of democracy. Or maybe it’s just about shopping at Whole Foods. I can’t tell nowadays.
