Product: Isis: Clearing the Eye - Visual/Aural Fragments and Excerpts 2001-2005 (2006)
Rating: 5.0
Everything I hoped it would be.
Goddamn they have done a good job with this DVD!A performance video is its own beast, and not every great band has a sense of what should be included on a video like this. Too often, underground bands think someone will actually be interested in their one-angle, head-on, color-bled Handy-cam footage.Not so here. The video quality varies a lot, but they have composed the whole package in such a way that the low-quality video looks intentional - or at least atmospheric. Some of it looks absolutely spectacular, though, and the 70 minute Oceanic-era show from Sydney is on par with anything on MTV. The sound quality is uniformly excellent and the Celestial-era material, recorded at CBGB's in NYC in 2001, actually sounds better here than it does on that record. (It helps that there is this awesome bald guy in the audience absolutely flipping out to it. He's more into it than the band. He almost makes me uncomfortable.)This captures everything that makes ISIS so fantastic live. The audio production is impressive, the live material is different from the original versions, the band is very tight. The only thing that suffers a bit in performance are Aaron Turner's vocals, which are frequently buried in the mix. Of course, his schizophrenic voice sets a ridiculously high bar for the sound engineer, and it probably couldn't have been done better.The music video for In Fiction doesn't do justice to the song, but it makes the best out of what must have been a pretty shoe-string budget.The graphic design is gorgeous - both packaging and the the DVD titles are top-notch and fit the material perfectly. Best of all, there is enough other material here to fill a coffee table book: lots of pretty photography, a discography (which irritates me since they have such a penchant for releasing rare records that I can't find) and -amazingly- the lyrics (but I don't want to know them, so I haven't checked that out).The only thing that is conspicuously absent from this record is any material from the new album. I'm not sure why, since they have been performing these songs for some time and I don't guess they will get around to releasing another DVD any time soon...Ripping.