Isis: Oceanic (2002)
It's clear vinyl clearance week on VinylSpinning, and today's subject is this black and gold splatter see-through wax reissue of the massively influential sophomore long-player from post-metal architects Isis ...
Their first, Celestial, had generated lots of underground buzz, but it was Oceanic that put these Boston residents on the global map (no pun on its title intended) with what turned out to be the most emulated post-metal blueprint of the '00s.
Of course, we weren't even calling it post-metal yet, since most of us head-bangers weren't cool enough to own Sigur Rós and Mogwai albums back in the late '90s (I'd almost gone there, but other records beckoned) when the post-rock terminology was being coined.
But many of us were intimately familiar with the era's closest metallic equivalent -- Neurosis, Godflesh, Mindrot, etc. -- and ready for more when Isis burst onto the scene -- even if we tended to call that stuff "progressive hardcore," at the time, not "post-metal."
Plus, I'd already picked up Seminar II by Aaron Turner's side project, Old Man Gloom, so Oceanic wasn't the sort of epiphany that had me jumping out of the bath like Archimedes shouting "eureka!," but I was immediately drawn to their newly refined musical vision.
This entailed taming some of Celestial's raw distortion through compression (beating the sludge and hardcore out of it, if you will), while offsetting their deliberate, droning, hypnotic, crushing riff tectonics with horn-like power chord blasts (see "From Sinking") and clean melodies, both subtle and sublime, capped by occasional vocals from Maria Christopher on epics like "The Beginning and the End," "Carry," and "Weight."
A couple of instrumental interludes ("Maritime," "-," and yes, that's just a dash) reinforce the album's focus on atmospherics, and yet for all their calculated world-building, Isis could still head-bang with convincing savagery on personal favorites like "False Light" and "Hym."
The long-term upshot of all this was that, where most heavy metal bands take listeners on a jarring, high-speed roller coaster ride, Isis subjected them to an arduous but ultimately rewarding marathon, as movements wax and wane in intensity, before strenuously reaching their resolutions.
Oh, and between Turner's oft-unintelligible roars and my chronic impatience for lyrics, I must admit that I never gave much thought to this concept album's storyline -- something to with incest and suicide, oh boy! -- and in retrospect, I'm glad I didn't.
But I do think Oceanic's music stands up very well to retroactive scrutiny, both as a spellbinding and immersive musical journey in its own right, and arguably as the standard by which all post-metal albums have since been judged.
More Isis: The Red Sea EP, Panopticon, In the Absence of Truth, Wavering Radiant.
