Memo to artists: If you want us to review your year-old song, just get Dave Gahan on it…

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Alfred Soto: Dave Gahan’s been doing these slow burns since 1986, and Goldfrapp’s production suits a voice that’s closer to “cavern” than “ocean.” Whether anyone cares in 2018 is an open question.
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Katherine St Asaph: Among my favorite things about the last Goldfrapp album is how often it indulged in the glorious invented micro-genre of “songs Sarah Brightman would have covered if she ever made another Fly“: Saint Saviour’s “This Ain’t No Hymn,” Pati Yang’s “Near to God” — so basically, operatic Depeche Mode. “Ocean,” perhaps influenced by co-producer The Haxan Cloak, sounded enough like them that it almost feels planned that Dave Gahan would appear on the re-release, the cliff to Alison Goldfrapp’s haze. The drama is sumptuous and seductive, and it’s fascinating how it sounds exactly like both artists at once — the “I borrowed bones, I borrowed skin” melody and faint strings is exactly like a Tales of Usbridge, but had I not heard the original I might have sworn it was Gahan’s contribution. It also makes me wonder — though I suspect the very idea would offend him — why he and Brightman never did a duet.
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Thomas Inskeep: Well of course it’s high drama; it’s a midtempo Goldfrapp track, after all. But few do high drama better than Depeche’s Gahan, so he fits nicely on this new version of “Ocean.” For that matter, he outshines Alison Goldfrapp, who sounds as if she just woke from a nap. 
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Anna Suiter: In re-releasing “Ocean,” Goldfrapp has managed to make the single feel even more foreboding. But even more than changing how the song feels (or makes you feel) when you listen to it, it’s the choices in how the song was rearranged that makes this feel just as complete as the original. Goldfrapp and Gahan, two very different-sounding voices, sing the same words in the verses and harmonize in the chorus, which adds more color to already dark lyrics and creates a very different dialogue in a song that didn’t exactly have one before.
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Vikram Joseph: Gloomy, extremely serious synth-pop; there are some nice Knife-ish icy electronics as it eventually flickers and threatens to reach for the surface in its second half, but Dave Gahan’s stentorian tombstone of a voice anchors it grimly to the seabed.
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Claire Biddles: Melodramatic Goldfrapp is my favourite Goldfrapp, and I can’t think of a more melodramatic addition than Dave Gahan. This is an inspired pairing, like the central duet of a corny goth musical.
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Alex Clifton: If Depeche Mode and Kylie Minogue ever made a Bond theme tune together, it’d sound like this. I think it sometimes goes a bit too abstract and ends up drowning in itself, but it’s still effectively moody. 
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Dorian Sinclair: “Ocean” is well-titled — not so much for the lyrics, which are abstracted to the point where I can’t begin to guess their significance, but for the mood the production evokes. There’s something deeply foreboding about the synths as they spool out, and the way the prechorus stretches into near-wordlessness only adds to that tension. The song feels murky and spooky in a way that I associate with deep water, and even if that association is only because of too much time spent playing Donkey Kong Country 3‘s underwater stages, it’s still one that works very well for me.
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Ian Mathers: I’m much younger, in a much smaller city than the one I live in now, and there is comparatively much less around to do and much more energy for going out and doing it on my part (also, more disposable income for booze), so I wind up in that one bar that’s in the basement below the other bar that’s an undergraduate meat market. About 45% of the crowd are friendly acquaintances or better; 45% are here every single time I am but I don’t know them at all; and the remaining 10% either wandered downstairs because the bathroom lines are shorter (and it’s easier to get away with doing drugs in them) and stuck around because the quasi-Goth Night that’s here every Saturday is more “exotic” than upstairs, or are newcomers who will wind up in one of the other categories soon enough. It is dimly lit and we found out many weeks ago that gin fluoresces under the blacklight. Sometimes there is some sort of fog machine. Drinks are 2 for $5 until midnight. On the dancefloor are a selection of people boasting moves ranging from the fluidly impressive to the frankly embarrassing (the latter equally so during the slow, dark ballads and the heavy, industrial tracks, partly because they don’t change it up at all between them), and this version of “Ocean” is playing loud enough that at some point while talking to a friend and playing pool badly one of us will break off to say “wait, what is this?” and eventually someone will ask Nate the DJ and he’ll tell us the name and I’ll make a note to download it when I get home, before I fall asleep and forget and have to ask again the next time he plays it.
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