Band:	Ou
Album:	II: Frailty
Style:	Progressive metal
Release date:	April 2024
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. 蘇醒 Frailty
02. 淨化 Purge [feat. Devin Townsend]
03. 海 Ocean
04. 血液 Redemption
05. 衍生 Capture And Elongate (Serenity)
06. 破魂 Spirit Broken
07. 歪歪地愛 Yyds
08. 輪迴 Reborn
09. 念 Recall

Ou have an ability to wander through melodies completely unmoored, as if the songs were springing to life for the first time as they met your ears. Progressive metal artists are often capable of making their compositions sound effortless – it is the bread and butter of their profession – but few manage this kind of improvisational feeling, to say nothing of how unique the very sound of Ou is.

Ou is a four-piece, founded by American drummer Anthony Vanacore in Beijing, instrumentally rounded out by locals Jing Zhang (guitars) and Chris Cui (bass) and fronted by vocalist Lynn Wu; I have not located any information as to who performs the keyboard parts, but these, too, are an important piece of Ou’s makeup. The starting place for Ou’s approach is something of a familiar niche in modern progressive metal: light yet lush instrumental brush strokes comparable to guitar-prog artists like Scale The Summit or David Maxim Micic, keeping this kind of mood-based songwriting as a gentle middle line while lilting back and forth between heavy bouts of djent and ambient electronica. Uncommonly smooth and immersive, their songs evolve almost as one large movement across a whole album, and Ou are aided in their captivating performances by a playfulness and certain compositional inclinations highly reminiscent of Devin Townsend.

Devy is the clearest comparison here – on One and II: Frailty alike, there are instances of heavy symphonic prog of the sort that Strapping Young Lad toyed with in its last days, cool ambient spaces that might call to mind Ghost or Casualties Of Cool, and little nods in the guitar tones or the flavor of the bold, operatic vocal lines. Take “Almost Again”, maybe one or two other tracks from The New Black, chop them up a bit, and you can see the logical basis for some of Ou. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that Devin himself would come on board to produce II: Frailty, even providing vocals on “Purge” (in Chinese, it sounds like); presumably this has something to do with their shared affiliation with InsideOut Music, but it was a destined matchup anyway, so it’s great that it worked out.

Yet all this gets us only so far into understanding Ou, and that’s not very far at all into the real singularity of their style. First of all, vocalist Wu throws a major wrench into any conventional characterizations, wielding her voice in bizarre melodic evolutions that bounce from sharp projections to soothing calm. According to their Bandcamp, when Ou was auditioning singers, the band presented some rough tracks and invited candidates to devise vocal accompaniment as they saw fit; how many of those freely interpreted vocal lines survived into final drafts, we can’t say, but it’s no wonder that Wu was chosen, for she tackles every melody as if the inspiration has only just struck her, and the effect is that of a constantly flowing and restructuring composition with a feeling of inscrutability and surprise similar to the audition that brought them all together to begin with. The title track opens II: Frailty with what sounds almost like a djenty solfège, later morphing into a Vocaloid-like waterfall of voices that surfaces again with light percussion on “Recall”; throughout the album Wu dispenses piercing bombast and quiet soul, sometimes in harsh harmony as if she herself were the Bulgarian State Television Female Choir, sometimes with a hypnotic combination of sing-song lilt and computer-like effects.

To fit the unusual versatility of the vocals, Ou spread themselves around the genre map equally inscrutable direction: they are capable of otherworldly electronic smoothness, and much of II: Frailty, like its predecessor, dwells in cool mathy synthpop vibes that often fully devolve into ambience, but then there are the Animals As Leaders-style bass and guitar slamming on “yyds” and the crashing chords all over “Spirit Broken” and the wall of sound that Devin’s distinctive screams fill out on “Purge”. As producer, he also brings to this album a sharper, heavier sound, with more brutal and impactful chugs and a slightly more cutting rhythm section.

Ou is much like the progressive metal version of a Bill Wurtz video, like if Haken covered the ending song from Portal, like if you uploaded Leprous to a cybernetic body, like if Between The Buried And Me were trapped inside an old Sega game. The vocals and instruments are on two separate but complementary journeys, one building complex landscapes of effervescent prog and the other firing up explosive discharges of grandiose emotion. There are plenty of other bands I’m inclined to compare Ou to – Sleigh Bells, Djerv, Imogen Heap, etc., and let’s bring back some of Radu’s comparisons for One, such as Bent Knee and tricot – but really II: Frailty, like One before it, is a wondrous and unique album that forces my ears to interpret things that I rarely hear in this combination.