When The Ocean Blue released its self-titled debut in 1988, it was my favorite thing to come out of Hershey, Penn., since those little aluminum-wrapped bundles of joy. The bass and guitar lines pogo-ed their way through my inner ear, while the keys wrapped the whole thing up in a wash of warmth. David Schelzel’s treatises on love were among the first songs I shared with a girlfriend. OK, maybe it was better than Hershey’s Kisses.
Sixteen years later, Schelzel and his band are still making music. The Sire Records veterans have just self-released a six-song EP, Waterworks. The bouncing melody lines and lyrical efficiency of the band’s first few albums pop up in places, but Oed Ronne, who replaced founding keyboardist Steve Lau in 1994, wrote half the songs, and the textures are more subtly layered on the EP. “Oed is growing constantly as a writer,” Schelzel said in one of a series of fading cell phone calls, as the band headed toward Philadelphia to kick off a Northeast tour. “It’s just a factor of what sounded good for this release.”
The last time I interviewed Schelzel, he had just returned from a video shoot in Iceland for “Sublime” from Beneath The Rhythm & The Sound, a single that found it’s way onto the modern rock charts in 1992, before the rock world became unfriendly territory for artists who weren’t angry. The Ocean Blue’s subsequent two records in the 1990s wouldn’t make nearly the splash.