Oceano, after previously going into hiatus due to singer, Adam, becoming a father (congratulations dude), have returned with their 3^rd deathcore inspired album that is a pretty good listen, from this Chicago based band.  I love their debut album, Depths, which came out in 2009.  Super heavy and the bass bomb drops were the heaviest I had heard.  The songs were memorable and the album is brutal.  Their second album, Contagion, dropped some of their core influences and they stayed more inline with the sound of U.S. brutal death metal.  I thought the album just kinda flew by without having any real personality and no true staying power to the songs.  The band has a huge internet based following, have been on a lot of tours and they seem like they are down to earth people.

Incisions brings back the core influence even more so and the album kind of falters from lack of originality, this is evident with bland album opener, “Eternal Wasteland”. Nice little downbeat slam 30 seconds into the song and I notice a pretty heavy djent influence this time around.  Song is slow and boring.  They should have opened the album with the second song, “Slow Murder”.  Song has some nice bass bomb drops, which are more evident on this album, than their second album.  Some nice tight blast beats, varying tempos and a killer slam at the 3.45 mark.  “Internal War” has some clean vocals from Adam, which are actually pretty cool sounding, and the song soon erupts into a vicious blast.  The 2.20 part has a nice bass bomb slam and again Adam’s vocals shining on this track with his gutturals, cleans and shrieks.

The middle section loses me a bit and I zoned the hell out several times, thinking I was on track 6, but I looked up and was on track 9.  Things started to sound too similar and I was annoyed that I wasted my time.  “Disseverance” is a pointless instrumental, because while the music sounds ok, I am not sure why lyrics/vocals were not part of this tune, since I feel this track would have benefited from being a regular song.  I mean instrumentals are supposed to show off musicianship, solos and shit and this song is just a deathcore song minus the vocals.  Anyway the album is ok, not the bang up come back album that I would have expected from the band, as far as I’m concerned.

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