ALBUM OF THE MONTH>HEAVY WATER
ISIS
Oceanic
Ipecac
Worlds as all-encompassing as this aren't easy to come by. In the Terrorizer universe, perhaps only Nick Cave and Michael Gira (Steve Austin makes a brave attempt with Today Is The Day's latest) are quite as adept as Aaron Turner in forging such a close bond between the intimate and the epic, in creating the most fully realised, universal environments from the most individual, most idiosyntratic of perspectives. But in Aaron Turner's case - and I'm sure he won't thank me for saying this - he's rapidly becoming something very special indeed; our most trustworthy post-millennial guide, in that the world Isis' latest inhabits sounds to these anxious ears like an acute diagnosis of our times. Because as much as a band like Skullflower amplified the waning signal of the 20th century, so Turner's work keeps rhythm with the ambiguous birth throes of the 21st. Whether with Isis, Old Man Gloom, or even his cover art for OMG and fellow Bostonians Cave In, all beautifully annonated scrapbooks of imaginated worlds, it all grows out of a common thread - a sense of having overshot, of trying to navigate the present when all your most familiar co-ordinates are echoes from another time.
That's not to say that 'Oceanic' isn't entirely without parallel; throughout its ebbs, flows, rising tides, relapses and rushes, you can hear the languid travelogues of Drowning Pool (the original, early 90s Californian alchemists, not the recently bereaved nu-metallers) leading into 'The Other', the lambent chimes of Labradford resonating throughout 'False Light', and rising up from 'Maritime's intricate, fledging eddies, even a nod to the woozy, sawing riffs of Echo & The Bunnymen's 'The Cutter'. But all these are ghosts flickering at the peripheries; more than anything, Isis are haunted by their hardcore heritage.
If 2000's full-length debut 'Celestial' carefully picked away at hardcore's crust to reveal a gilded chassis beneath, 'Oceanic' has jettisoned its most central tenet; its awareness of its roots. This isn't NYHC, it's 'NowhereHC, still taking up on the tentative inch-recoil-and-holler instigated by Fugazi, but here it doesn't offer any reassurance of grounding, it sounds cast adrift and bereft, more aftershock than assertion. On opener 'The Beginning And The End' the riffage is all post-coital thrusts and refrains, dissolving into radiant melancholia, like embers trailing upwards from a dying fire; on the following 'The Other', taken to the end of its tether as it frays into an inconsolable searchlight pulse.
'Oceanic' sounds as though it's in the process of exhausting all its reference points, allowing itself to pass through into limbo and gradually transform itself, butterfly-style, dreaming of what it's going to become next. The midpoint track, '-' is something of a Passover, all bubbling, aquatic depths, abandoned frequencies and lapping shores, depositing you at the aforementioned 'Maritime' and through to the mesmeric rebirth that is 'Weight', building up from the most fragile of timbres as Cave In-style panoramic percussion breathes life into a stunning, heart-in-mouth ascension, chords rising up on a successive updrafts and shedding their ballast as though they're undergoing a hallowed rite of purification. And as the closing tracks, 'From Sinking' and 'Hym' are shot through with their migratory charge, this densely entwined network of departures, passages and cathartic uprisings will entrance even the most battle-hardened among you.
If you aren't breathless with anticipation by now, 'Oceanic' will certainly leave you. A far-flung, tantalisingly unfinished masterpiece.
[9.5] Jonathan Selzer
Terrorizer magazine, issue 104, nov2002
