#89 The Best Album of 2000 Match #35: Shellac vs. Isis
Hey folks! Week eight, lookin’ great!
Today’s Best Album of 2000 match is:
#31 Shellac, 1000 HURTS
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vs.
#98 Isis, CELESTIAL
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Today, we have a Designated Cheerleader! It’s for CELESTIAL, and it’s by @bikemogacz. Take it away!
On purely the merits of being a good way to spend an hour, I think Celestial should win most matchups it enters. The riffs, the sludge, the power, the grace...it's all there in droves, and the combined result is something so definitively "post-metal" that almost anything else described as such suffers in comparison. But I'd rather talk about the dichotomy that fascinates me most about the record. In spite of its clear thematic focus on decay, destruction, and loss, the progression in meaning of Celestial within Isis' larger discography over time is itself a profound meditation on the value of change and growth, even in that which we perceive to be static.
Post-Celestial Isis was a different animal than everything that came before. Two EPs, a demo record, and a few other spare recordings featured touches of thrash and doom metal, and were above everything else, loud. There's some good stuff there, but very little of it suggested something in the band's future other than "fun to rock out to for a while." Celestial, the band's first LP, did not necessarily change all of that at once. "Glisten" and "Swarm Reigns (Down)" are as sludgy and straightforward as their earlier work, even borrowing some of the same insect-laden imagery. But moments like the outro to the title track, the progression of "Collapse and Crush," and the breakdown in "Deconstructing Towers" demonstrate a band beginning to wield more than just the one tool. And their subsequent 2002 magnum opus Oceanic progresses even further in terms of both songwriting and sound, so much so that the relative baby steps of Celestial become more profound in retrospect. The moment where Aaron Turner's howls join the final riff of "Gentle Time" might as well be a prophecy: "Rain down and bring a gentle time."
Of course, it's not necessarily remarkable that Isis progressed over time. After all, very few bands are content to keep tilling the same exact grounds for decades. What is remarkable is how this specific record refused to stand still. The following year, Isis released the EP SGNL>05, whose tracks were taken from the same recording sessions as Celestial. The highlight is Justin Broadrick's remix of Celestial's title track which can be read as directly prescribing the more ethereal sounds Isis would later be known for. Additionally, Isis often released live recordings which almost always managed to add another dimension to even seemingly straightforward songs. Take the version of "Collapse and Crush" from the DVD release Clearing the Eye. The fury of the opening passage introduces two almost paradoxical concepts that would remain hallmarks of the band throughout the rest of its existence: the layering of guitars playing off each other in subtle ways and the wall of sound produced when that all comes together.
Even after the band's 2010 breakup, Celestial continued to iterate. The 2013 remaster of the record was not "needed" in a formal sense of the word, but it did serve to bridge the gap between the band's more polished sound that came after and the sludge which birthed it. The payoff of this is immediate, too: the opening riff of the title track is fuller in sound with the background voice more perceptible than before and accordingly, more haunting. The modified artwork, cribbing the control towers from the titular location of the 1962 French film La Jetée, also serves a dual purpose. First and most obviously, it calls back to the classic themes and images present in most of Isis' discography: control, domination, and towers (lots of towers). But it also invokes the themes of the film to interrogate the very idea of re-releasing past works. The climax of La Jetée imparts the message that, try as you might to revisit your past, you cannot escape your present. Quite a thing to internalize for a defunct band looking to revisit a classic! This journey comes full circle with their sole reunion show, performed in 2018 to benefit the family of the late Caleb Scofield. Now going by the name Celestial, the band chose to close their set with the extended version of, you guessed it, "Celestial". This version marries the frenetic beginning of the original with the moody outro of the remix, which serves as something of a skeleton key for the entire history of the band. The superficial summary often applied to Isis is that they mastered this loud/soft dynamic, but that in large part is what music is! Whenever I revisit those last 15 minutes of the band's existence, I both see and feel musical perfection, projected out across the two decade journey of the most meaningful and special band of my life.
In summation, Celestial represents not the birth of something, but rather the first glimpse of something as it comes into its own, reflected back into the present, forever. Pretty good
Terrific work, @bikemogacz! Thanks!
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A big thanks to all the voters and all the Designated Cheerleader writers! None of this works without you.
Kent