I can’t say much about this draft, but it was originally written out for something and that something didn’t materialise, in part because for the first attempt I realised I didn’t have enough time to put forward something that actually said what I wanted, and the second attempt was prevented due to getting dumped and needing to deal with that. Instead, I’m taking the below and gradually turning it into an essay, and am going to make a fresh attempt at that something.

The final version of this essay will be published on From Somewhere out the Back. If you’ve been following my stuff here long enough, then you’ll recognise the name as the title for when I write about music releases in my music collection. I’d been intending to dedicate a space for those pieces for a while, and of course rather than hold to that, the space expanded to more than just music.

The draft below is just to give an idea of progress.

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Oceansize were a band that existed between 1998 and 2011. They spent a lot of that time touring and working on music, and that’s all that needs to be said about them here, as this is not the space to completely dive into their history.

I discovered Oceansize purely by the luck of FBi 94.5 giving me one of their singles (“Remember Where You Are”) as a prize, and then later on their album Effloresce. That was 2004 and 2005, I believe. A good few months later, toward the tail end of 2005 I was in JB Hi-Fi and I saw Everyone Into Position on one of the racks. I remember being surprised about a new Oceansize album being out, probably thinking it had been a while, and proceeded to buy it.

A good while ago I decided to spin Everyone into Position for the first time in a while. I’ve got it starting with the pre-gap track, “Emp(irical) Error”. Then it’s the opening track, and my favourite: “The Charm Offensive”. The album is flowing in a way it hasn’t for a long time. “Music for a Nurse” is a great track, and then it leads into “New Pin”, my favourite track.

The album keeps going, moving with a deft tightness, and gets to my favourite track, “Mine Host”, a fragile, spaced out, drifting piece of mood music, and a good respite in the middle of a violent whorl. Eventually the album has to finish, and it finishes with my favourite track, “Ornament/The Last Wrongs”. What a fucking song. Powerful on record; powerful live.

According to Mike Vennart back when he made use of Tumblr:

“The writing process itself was interesting, we’d bought a computer and some mics and were making decent demos on our own, much to the delight of our record company. We started writing ‘onscreen’ for the first time ever. Songs like ‘Heaven Alive’ and ‘Meredith’ were pieced together. Steve worked up a 4-track demo for what became ‘Dirty Sweet Smell Of The Summer’. I brought in the chords for parts of ‘Charm Offensive’ and we designed it from scratch as the opening song. The whole album was, from my point of view, designed as the ideal festival headline set. We all went to Glastonbury every year and had some super-drugged up experience watching Radiohead or The Flaming Lips or Mogwai or Cardiacs or whoever. We, or rather I, wanted something that would work on that level.”

Thinking of Everyone Into Position in such a way does make sense. How it dips and rises, and speeds up and slows down has that sort of riverine flow feel, but thinking of it in that manner also feels limiting, because it works as a regular main act set too. The album starts with “The Charm Offensive” which seems to brood and menace before eventually pushing out of that. It moves toward more melody and questioning, and eventually lets loose, releasing all that was from the start and throws down. It calls to action; it calls to preparation. As guitar, bass and drums cut and floor everything, vocals scream out “Everyone into Position!” multiple times. It’s a song certain of itself.

From there the album moves into “Heaven Alive”, a song of Oceansize’s that was floating around for a while prior to this album. It looks more at atmosphere in places and it takes that roaring, raging sound from the opener and turns it into something more melodic and singular. “Homage to a Shame” pushes back into intensity and seems to go on a more hardcore journey, or some sort of avant-garde metal, though I imagine the band would call it more “prog indie” or something like that. Maybe they’d refer to it as “a thought”. I don’t know.

“Meredith”, “Music for a Nurse” and “New Pin” follow after. The first two move toward a gentler, more open and atmospheric space. It’s a very sudden release in some ways, but it also feels fitting. The sounds are gentle, even when they “rage” (the term is being used incredibly loosely at this point), and there seems to be a cradling toward a naked openness. “New Pin” itself sits in an odd spot as it straddles both the more aggressive side of Everyone Into Position and the calmer, but it fits with the prior two songs quite well in lifting back into a more “direct” space without dismissing them. It also feels like one of the more experimental tracks, though the whole album is, really.

“No Tomorrow” also straddles both sides, though in a much more overt manner. It starts gentle, though not without an undercurrent of pressure, releases, and gradually moves toward a breakdown of sorts. It feels pummeling the whole way through. It’s almost at odds with “Mine Host”, if “Mine Host” had felt out of place. It offers a breather; a fragility among all the noise and loudness, and seems to hold a darkness that can’t quite be pinpointed. It’s gentle, but it’s also not.

From there you get “You Can’t Keep a Bad Man Down”, which is the least narrow-feeling song on Everyone Into Position. It’s a monolithic slab of more expansive stuff, just wide and grandiose, and slow moving. Cinematic, in a way. It doesn’t quite pummel or pound or smash, but it looms large and looms over, and seems almost like it’s going to crush, and it puts forward more heaviness in the vocals which drift in a way that is at odds whilst in complete harmony with everything else.

At that point it’d be fair to tap out, maybe. It has been around fifty seven minutes of an album moving through different moods and feels and textures, and it’s as bloated as it is lean. What else is there, other than a poignant closer?

“Ornament/The Last Wrongs” is one of Oceansize’s signature songs, in a sense; in particular, one that strongly defines them as they were in 2005. It starts small, and it grows, and grows, and it keeps on growing. Oceansize put their all into this one and it charges when it needs to. To be fair, the band did the same with earlier songs, but here everything culminates. It asks questions without trying to provide answers, and it speaks universally of a state of mind at that point in time. It’s one that’s quite relatable, and it seems though, that among it all, there’s some belief or idea that maybe everything will be okay, despite all the questions.

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Back in 2015, Mike Vennart wrote “Everyone Into Position did not set the world alight; far from it. But it was a very important record to me when we were making it, and to this day I respect it’s ambition, it’s scope and it’s (sic) fucking fearlessness.” Mike has a particularly poetic way with words, and generally does not mince them, so I have no doubt that this is an openly frank assessment of the work.

Likewise, Everyone Into Position didn’t elicit much of a response from myself when I heard it the first couple of times. I remember listening to it and thinking “yeah that was great, that’s fine”. I know that “New Pin” stuck out a bit more than the other songs, and got a bit of play on its own, but I spun the album a few times, apparently “got it”, but I’m old enough to know I didn’t get it at all.

When the album started to actually click, I listened to “Ornament/The Last Wrongs” on repeat for two hours. I was off to one of those all-night movie things. I think it was late 2006 or early 2007. I was walking from a train station to the shopping centre where the event was being held. I had “Ornament/The Last Wrongs” on my playlist for the travel, and it came on, and it hit like a weight.

It went right for the gut, and that turned something on in my brain, and made me feel something in the sense that it resonated hard. I was the adolescent in pain and not mature enough to understand those feelings, but that song spoke to me, and so I listened to it for the rest of the time I was making my way, just walking through the night to where I was meant to be. It fucked me up then, and it fucks me up now, though the way it does now is different. I am older than Mike was when he wrote those lyrics and when they first hit my ears. I have a better understanding of why, and it hits deeper, and takes root and grows.

Living in Australia is not conducive to being a fan of Oceansize. They mostly toured The UK and Europe, and ventured outside a few times. As such, other than being quite fortunate enough to catch two of their shows when they toured Australia, there’s a lot of the experience of being a fan of theirs that I missed out on. There is live footage on YouTube, sure, but there’s a difference between watching that and being there. But them making a fan out of me was easy work. They were a band to give time to, and you’d be rewarded for it.

Over time more of EIP‘s songs revealed themselves to me, and I was drawn further into the Oceansize spell. They became one of my favourite bands, no contest. I mean, they’d have headed that way over time – Effloresce is an amazing work and it appealed to me – but EIP cemented it.

Everyone Into Position is, in some ways, an erratic album. Its mood – at least in terms of sound – is variable, though some songs hang together better than others. Perhaps not all of it strikes gold, and that’s part of its charm… maybe. It’s difficult to describe the album as an immediate one, or an easy listen either. At this point it’s difficult to offer much more beyond what I’ve said, and all I’ve really done is describe the album.

My ex has said that Oceansize don’t sound like a happy band, and in some ways that’s true. What with how EIP touches on a few different things, it can take some time to really see how it all connects and oscillates in waves. At least, that’s what I feel.

That said, I don’t know if I could wholly articulate how I feel about this album in a way that could successfully argue for why I think it’s worth listening to. What I think I can say, with confidence, is that over time, it has become my favourite of Oceansize’s releases, and might just be their best. Sure, Frames is a better album, but Everyone Into Position might just be their best.

Last year Everyone Into Position turned twenty. Twenty years of revealing itself, growing further, and aging really well. Twenty years of being part of the soundtrack of my life, and twenty years of putting forward all these interesting sounds and textures and moods, and skill in service of the music. It might not be the most known album, but it feels relevant, even today. It’s an impressive work. Sprawling and concise at the same time, technical and simple, abstract and concrete, ornate, pretty, and affecting in all the right places.