March 7, 2004

Isis, Oceanic

Here's the extent of my dwindling indie cred: I didn't get Isis' Oceanic, widely acclaimed as one of the year's best albums in 2002, until quite recently. It's a shame, too, because it absolutely destroys. How good is it? My friend Mark is a big fan of the folkier end of indie rock, the Mountain Goats and Iron & Wines of the world, and he loves it, and this is a metal album. It's not jokey ha-ha kitschfest like the Darkness might put out; nor is it quite the reimagined prog rock of a band like DC's the Fucking Champs. Oceanic reminds me a little bit of Tool and a little bit of the Melvins and a little bit of Helmet, and maybe a little bit of the heavy metally East Coast hardcore like Snapcase and Earth Crisis that I listened to in high school. The best description I can give is that it sounds like Shellac would have sounded if Steve Albini had grown up entirely on a diet of Black Sabbath; there's no Bad Brains-style shredding going on, but there are monster guitars and everything is buried in about six hundred pounds of sludge. A yowling banshee of a female singer sings unintelligibly on two tracks. Things build slowly (in that Unwound-ish, Juno-y sort of way that I love so much), like water stirring right before a hurricane. It's great -- I'm angry at myself for missing it for two years. Play it very, very loud while driving at night.

[Addendum: The Fucking Champs are actually from San Francisco. There is absolutely no difference between these cities, so it was a perfectly understandable mistake.]

posted at 11:49 PM | 3 comments

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