Oceanic

Oceanic is the second full-length album by American post-metal band Isis, released on September 16, 2002 by Ipecac Recordings.

> Concept

The album reintroduces the water and female themes of past releases the Red Sea and Celestial through a story: A man at the brink of emotional numbness finds a female counterpart who completes him (“The Beginning and the End”). However, he soon finds that she has had a long-term incestuous relationship (“False Light”, “Weight”) with her brother (“Hym”, “The Other”). This drives him to lose all hope, and he commits suicide through drowning (“from sinking sands, he stepped into light’s embrace”).

The entire story is described by frontman Aaron Turner in a radio interview and in more nebulous terms in the album’s booklet.

It could be postulated that Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass offered some inspiration to the band. This is present in the naturalistic theme of the album, and the fact that the title of the opening track, “The Beginning and the End”, is a phrase used twice - on lines 30 and 31.

> Reception & Style

Its style marks a distinct departure from their previous sound; up until this point, Isis had been characterised by crushing, distorted guitars and a coarse, unforgiving tone. With this album came the introduction of lengthy periods of clean guitar, large amounts of ambient noise and female vocals; a notable post-rock influence, first hinted at on SGNL>05 and Celestial. This transition was retrospectively labelled by FACT’s Robin Jahdi as “one of the more eye-opening musical metamorphoses of the decade”; it has been described as “seminal”. As Ben Richardson notes in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the album’s release “fomented an explosion of glacial, Neurosis-inspired instrumental ‘post-metal’”.