I’m Really Going to Miss The Ocean Party
A couple of weeks ago, our Hottest 100 Day kick-ons got rowdier than expected as kick-ons so often do. As so often happens at said kick-ons, the conversation turned to music. It was the sort of drunken music conversation that would’ve sounded insufferably pretentious to any outsiders listening in. But for those involved, it was an opportunity to express and enhance our passions for the music that we loved. The conversation turned to the Ocean Party, the prolific Wagga via Melbourne six-piece. We played a couple of their tunes that we stated were worthy of going down as Australian classics, pondered their extensive discography and came to the unanimous decision that the Ocean Party were capable of great things in the future. Yesterday the Ocean Party announced that they were calling it time and I haven’t been this sad in a fair while.
To be specific, I haven’t been this sad since the Ocean Party’s last heartbreaking announcement: the sudden death of their guitarist and friend Zac Denton. While I had never met Zac, his passing affected me strangely. In my head, his tall, skinny stature was the personification of the Ocean Party, along with Snowy’s bleached blond hair. His relatable lyrics made it seem as though he could’ve been friends with anyone and everyone and his many, many melodies proved his undeniable talent. Zac’s passing left an incomprehensible hole in the Ocean Party, which is why they’ve decided to call it a day.
The Ocean Party are a band of many songwriters, many albums and many sounds. It almost feels lazy to describe a band as “uniquely Australian”, but I don’t think a band has defined the sounds of the suburbs as much as the Ocean Party have. Their combination of tight, melodic guitars and the conversational drawl in many of their vocals results in anthems for the every-person. No matter who you are, the Ocean Party are singing for you.
You can bet your bottom dollar that the Ocean Party have copped every synonym of the word “prolific” in interviews and reviews. With six members, six songwriters and nine albums in seven years, you can understand why writers are running out of adjectives (when I interviewed Zac’s brother Lachlan in 2017, I chose ‘dedicated’ and ‘consistent’). Their unique, ‘release everything we write’ philosophy came up at the aforementioned kick-ons. We discussed the amount of Ocean Party songs that we considered brilliant and thought that, if the Ocean Party wrote for a couple of years and then released the best of that stuff, they could make a genuinely great album; a potential Australian classic; a hypothetically perfect album that we compared to Real Estate’s Days. But that’s not what the Ocean Party are about. I asked Lachlan about their ‘consistent output’ and he said “we all just really like the idea of records being something of a snapshot of a period. Like, if we look back on any of our records we would be able to be like ‘okay that’s where we were at in 2014, that’s where we were at in 2015 musically’ as opposed to spreading a record out over three years. People change a lot in that time…So putting out everything that we do, I don’t know, I just really like that as a concept. It’s just fun.”
This is the philosophy that the Ocean Party have followed with their final release, Nothing Grows, an EP of songs that Zac wrote. They wrote on Facebook: “Before his passing, Zac had written an EP of songs that we were going to release at some stage in 2019. Zac was an ardent believer in releasing music and his extensive back catalogue at the age of just 24, is evidence of that.” I came across a link to their Bandcamp throughout the day yesterday, so I thought I’d check out how much damage a pre-order of the EP on vinyl would do. I took no notice of the price when I saw the words in red: ‘One remaining’. I hurriedly snatched it up.
It’s going to be sad going on as a music fan knowing that I won’t have the Ocean Party providing a record of quality indie rock songs at least once a year. It’s even sadder knowing that I’ll never see them play live again (I saw them twice, an incomparably small number considering the amount of times they graced Brisbane. They were great both times.) For now, I can only wish them all the very best in the future, fall back on the memories that I’ve made with and because of them and enjoy what I genuinely believe to be one of the greatest Australian songs of all time.
