Oceanator
Everything Is Love and Death
POLYVINYL
Oceanator’s Elise Okusami comes out swinging on her third album, Everything Is Love and Death—and not just metaphorically. In the video for lead single “Get Out,” the songwriter and one-woman post-grunge band actually goes at her demons with an ax. Okusami last did battle with darkness in the tongue-in-cheek video for 2022’s “Bad Brain Daze,” in which skeletons stormed her apartment and chased her back into bed. This time, she does the chasing. “Done doing things just halfway / And I don’t care what you think anyway,” she sings directly into the camera over a pulse-pounding guitar riff. When a devilish figure snatches her crystal necklace, she fights back, gets knocked down, then grabs her weapon and strikes to kill. “The next time that I see you, it’s on sight / ’Cause I’m not going down without a fight.”
Okusami approaches the entire album with that same clenched-fist determination, swinging another kind of ax with newfound confidence. Her last LP, 2022’s Nothing’s Ever Fine, was a loose concept record structured around leitmotifs and apocalyptic visions, and it was also her first time playing a baritone guitar—a low-register instrument well suited to her riff-heavy garage-rock sound (see: “Stuck,” a ripper of biblical proportions). Everything Is Love and Death applies the same baritone heaviness to a full batch of the tight, catchy rock songs that characterized her debut Things I Never Said. This time, Okusami attacks those songs with a particular gusto: when she belts, as on the roaring “Lullaby,” she belts hard. When she riffs, as on the 10-ton bass showcase “Drift Away,” she riffs with the full weight of the album title in her hands.
Compared to past releases, everything sounds just a little fuller and more sure of itself. Eight years of experience writing, performing, and recording can have that effect, and so can a month in the studio with producer Will Yip, who accentuates all of Okusami’s best qualities as an arranger. Vocal stacks and synth pads thicken the mixes like hearty indie-rock stew. Blunt force drums propell upbeat rockers like “Happy New Year” and moody jams like “Cut String.” On closer “Won’t Someone,” clean baritone guitar and timpani lend Okusami’s feelings oceanic depth. Even on vulnerable, yearning songs like opener “First Time” (“I miss you, but I don’t wanna miss you”), she sounds resolute, wielding a gravitas reminiscent of Screaming Females’ Marissa Paternoster.
Oceanator’s emotional high water marks remain unbeaten—“Be Here,” for example, is a synthy ballad similar but not equal to “I Would Find You,” her first album’s unforgettable centerpiece. But Everything Is Love and Death still takes the crown as Okusami’s most thoroughly satisfying release, and the one that cements her reliability; she’s reckoned with the end of the world and come back stronger for it. Her determination peaks on “Get Out,” where she repurposes the title of Things I Never Said. Back then, she was chiding you for misrepresenting her: “You’ve been reading too much into the things I never said.” Now, she’s asserting herself before you have the chance to misunderstand: “I wanna be here, not stuck in my head / Imagining all the things I never said.” Be sure to listen up, especially when her ax does the talking.
