Aaron Turner will probably go to his grave before revealing specifics on the concept behind Celestial. Turner and the rest of his bandmates are unified in believing that the work of deconstructing towers and deciphering sgnls is best left to the listener. That said, the towers referenced on four of the songs on Celestial (and its companion EP, SGNL>05) were directly inspired by the Orly Airport towers in Chris Marker’s groundbreaking 1962 photomontage (and later inspiration for 12 Monkeys) La Jetée, where the soundtrack supplies a sense of movement to enhance the static images. That’s kinda the wavelength that Celestial is on, as embodied by the title track, which bends time and space repeatedly in just shy of 10 minutes.
It’s worth noting that the concept of the towers in Celestial ties in particularly well with the meaning of the Tower card in the Tarot deck, which broadly represents upheaval and change. Deconstructing the tower is a way of memorializing the old and ushering in the new, which is what Celestial accomplished in hindsight. The first full-length album from Isis is very much a marker of transition from the more primordial sludge metal of earlier releases to the more polished post-metal sound that defined the band from Oceanic onward. Turner describes it as a “work on becoming,” with the idea that it’s often more interesting to observe how things are being put together than engage with the final form. Celestial is unquestionably a middle point between two distinct periods in the band’s oeuvre.
Celestial is a strong, confident, mature and focused work in the vein of Cave In’s Jupiter or Botch’s We Are the Romans—just one that happened to struggle to capture the limelight with stiff competition from the two near-flawless albums that followed it. We salute the rawness and immediacy of Celestial, as well as its sonic experimentation: The then Boston-based quintet was taking inspiration from everywhere and applying it to an expansive canvas. The jump between the industrial grind of “Celestial (the Tower)” to the comparatively quiet melodicism of “Gentle Time” (featuring an early vocal turn by keyboardist Bryant Clifford Meyer) represents a huge pendulum swing, but the tone, tension, emotional heft and uncomfortable sense of menace are constant throughout.
To hear the band members tell it below, this is the album where Isis dropped its obsession with administering sonic punishment and opened the door to exploring nuance. You can hear that on all of the “SGNL” tracks, transient seemingly random bursts of noise that subtly shift attention and prime the listener for what’s to come. The Isis lineup that coalesced on Celestial—featuring Turner, Meyer, bassist Jeff Caxide, guitarist Mike Gallagher and drummer Aaron Harris—later focused on exploring the less ugly components of the band’s sound. Thematically speaking, Celestial is opaque compared to the rest of the Isis catalog. But when it comes to totemic riffs, it remains unsurpassed. Welcome to the Decibel Hall of Fame for the second time; we hope you’ll be back.
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