2002: Isis - “Carry”

I think it’s too early to make lists compiling the albums that changed the way we heard music in the first decade of the 21st century. Still, there are some that have popped up here and there, and Isis’ Oceanic is missing in most of them.

It’s easy to reduce the album’s importance to its marriage of downtuned and slow metal with the clean guitars and suspended emotion characteristic of post rock, but, for my Chuck E. Cheese tokens, the band’s real genius lies in their song arrangements. Take “Carry” for example; it starts with a droning and calm sound of guitars and synths that is punctured with a bass and kick drum marking a very simple beat, a slow rise that they also cleverly use in the song “Weight, ”the gentlest of the songs found within Oceanic. Afterwards, a guitar melody appears to give the song some direction which ends in a huge distorted chord that has the band lurching in riff form. Aaron Turner growls in a desperate manner while the riffs become darker and lower in register (and Maria Christopher’s vocals makes it feel more solemn) and then, just when you think things are about to break, the sound steps back a little, uncorking a gentle but steady riff that has the impact of a neutron bomb. Then they scale it back up again, first with distortion, then with thickness until the song is done, a chapter completed, drafted, corrected and checked.

Most of the action described in the lyrics of this concept album happen in the span of a few seconds. This is where the narrative and its marriage with sound works best; the poetics of a man taking his own life by drowning makes the music suffocating in its heaviness yet epiphanous in its softer shades, like the light many describe at the end of a tunnel when exiting life. Capturing the meaning of a moment in time and its elegiac implications in song form is harder to achieve than writing a standard story with little subtleties; in other words, the bread and butter of rock concept albums.

Isis bathe the listener with music that is made to detonate in little deaths, keeping air away from the lungs to make expiration and self-negation things of beauty and true art.

DeLorean

There’s a lot of good music out there, and it’s not all being released this year. With DeLorean, we aim to rediscover overlooked artists and genres, to listen to music historically and contextually, to underscore the fluidity of music. While we will cover reissues here, our focus will be on music that’s not being pushed by a PR firm.

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