Isis!

Over the past week or so I've been playing quite a bit more Isis in my music rotation. I had originally downloaded some Isis based on a reference to their Oceanic release. At the time I really wasn't getting a lot out of metal, so it sat unlistened to on my old machine. When I got my laptop, it never made the jump and so sat mute for months.

Enter Rock Band 2. Mastodon has a track "Colony of Birchmen" in the play list for Rock Band 2. And I have had hella-fun playing that track. Which brought the glory of Mastodon to my Zune library. I have the Zune subscription which essentially entitles me to unlimited downloads which you have on a month to month (as long as you maintain your subscription) license. In addition, the service was recently updated so that every month you get to designate 10 songs to keep. Which is somewhat beside the point. But not entirely.

Because of the nature of the subscription, I haven't bought a whole lot of hard copies of CDs recently (nor purchased digital albums). But I have gotten a hell of a lot of music. One of the other bits of the Zune market place that I've been a big fan of is the Related option that is present on most artists. Once you've found an artist you like, you can view the genres they fall into, the bands that influenced them, and bands that have a related style.

So Mastodon hits my hard drive like a pile of candy studded nails, and I start trolling through related artists, downloading merrily all the way. Which gets me to Isis. The name rings a bell (obviously I had downloaded it previously), but the music is pretty fresh to me.

I listen to the entire Oceanic album, and proceed to download the rest of their discography. This is definitely metal, but not your standard whiskey and motor oil fare. This is spacious and vast. Akin to the ambiance that bands like Explosions in the Sky and Broken Social Scene dwell in. But harder. This is the thinking mans metal. And I like it quite a bit.

Which pulls in another direction. They've got a serious prog influence. Which has been bubbling up as something that has a great deal of appeal to me. For those unfamiliar, do a search on Math Rock. Math Rock has been nibbling at the edges of my brain recently.

And to close the loop a little bit on this. Mastodon did not make themselves known to me via Rock Band 2. No indeed. The first time I saw them was in this little gem.