BEING AS AN OCEAN is an American Post-Hardcore quartet formed in Alpine, California in 2011. Reportedly, the band's name was influenced by a quote spoken by Mahatma Gandhi; "You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty." Suffering through some line-up changes early in their career, the solidified line-up released "Waiting for Morning to Come" in early September 2017. The album contains fourteen tracks. Post-Hardcore can be a fairly wide descriptive term for bands in the Melodic Metal/Metalcore area as well, but let's get to some of the highlights here and listen for ourselves. The album has somewhat of a pattern, in that most of the tracks are tied together in pairs with a short instrumental leading into the next track with vocals. I think it creates an immediate impact and is indicative of what I love about this genre.

"Pink and Red" is a neat little piano/keyboard short instrumental that leads to the song "Black & Blue." The clean vocals are pretty whispers in the wind, but angry shouted vocals are in the mix as well, imparting some emotional peaks. The "Post" sound is immediately evident from the lack of a charging guitar riff, allowing the beauty of effects and electronica to take center stage. "Glow" has a similar sound. Like soft waves on calm waters, everything around you seems to drop off and all you can see to the horizon is the sun and open blue skies. Even with harsh vocals the feeling remains. "OK" opens with some brief spoken words on the subject of love. A more noticeable clean guitar riff leads the melody here, combined with harsh vocals. One thing is for sure...the band has an honest flair for building harmonies.

"Dissolve" delivers a big chorus to energize your soul. The harsh vocals deliver an anger and intensity that balances this nicely. It speaks about what happens when you "wear your heart on your sleeve," the phrase that refers to outwardly pointing emotions and how people can take advantage of that. "eB that srewoP ehT" is a track about as odd as its title. There are some chord progressions that you can hear but they are buried under a bed of vocal noise, like the sounds of an animal lurking in the darkness. "Suddenly I was Alone" opens with clean guitar notes that echo as chimes or bells, bright and razor sharp. It picks up a little more instrumentation along the way but the four note pattern carries throughout.

The title track closes the album. It's the first song on the album with a leading guitar riff that registers as fairly heavy for the genre, along with shouted vocals. Once again the clean vocals in the chorus push the melody to the forefront. The song ends in an emotional crescendo that sticks with you, before some jazzy saxophone notes takes it to completion. Overall, I was not sure what to expect on the album, as I pointed out before that the boundaries can be pretty wide in the "Post" anything category. But as a hardened Metalhead I still believe in the power of melody over everything else and they delivered that here. They have strong sensibilities when it comes to songwriting and have created a beautiful album with a lot of emotion.