There's an awesome beauty in the music of Boston-born, California-based quintet Isis. It's a beauty made to fight its way through adversity, and it's all the more affecting for its contrast with the clangorous din that surrounds it. Moments of radiance emerge like shafts of rainbow light furtively pushing through pinholes in an overcast sky. Stopping to admire them is like lingering over the prismatic play of colors swirled through an oil patch atop a muddy puddle that hides a nasty pothole in a well-traveled stretch of asphalt.
Never fast but not especially slow, Isis songs linger for long, long minutes in a sort of motionless stasis. Moments of sharp upheaval arrive eventually, and when they do, they compel a purely visceral response. But between them are long, static stretches of shimmering guitar tones from Aaron Turner and Mike Gallagher, which float iridescent, conjoining with Cliff Meyer's keyboard, samples and occasional third guitar. Drummer Aaron Harris lays down an implacable pulse, usually punctuated with the gunfire pop of a snare drum with its wires turned off. Restless bassist Jeff Caxide expends the most effort in trying to rouse Isis from groaning stasis. His instrument is also the loudest element in the band's live mix; Caxide's lowest notes liquefy whatever it was you had for dinner. Turner also lends this music a voice: sometimes moaning, sometimes delivered as a parched roar. More often than not, Turner's voice rides somewhere in the middle of the mix; it's not that his lyrics are unimportant, but rather that his howl of isolation, overpowered by the band's elemental din, provides as telling an account of enervated desperation and detachment as words could describe.
(For classical-music devotees who've made it this far, think of Górecki's Symphony No. 3 played on distorted guitars with a massive backbeat, sans girlish soprano. For rockists who got here via Google, go listen to Górecki's Symphony No. 3.)
On Thursday night at Avalon -- a desacralized sanctuary in Chelsea that has also been home to some of New York City's more spectacularly debauched dance parties -- Isis was preceded by the outsider hip-hop group Dälek, its labelmate on Mike Patton's Ipecac label. The opening act was Zombi, a Pittsburgh-based prog-rock duo whose most-often cited influence has been the music Italian band Goblin created for films by Dario Argento. That may have been the case previously, but the duo's new release, Surface to Air (on the Relapse label), is an uncanny mix of Phaedra-era Tangerine Dream and Rush circa Permanent Waves, Moving Pictures and Signals. (Some of drummer A.E. Paterra's turnaround flourishes sound as if he studied not only Neal Peart's phrasing, but the actual tunings of his tom-toms.)
This being a Thursday night, I missed both openers, arriving just in time for Isis's first crunching chords. Most of tonight's set was drawn from the band's latest release, the stunning Panopticon. (Newcomers to the band should start here and work backwards.) Standing to the left of the stage close to the front, I was pinned by the band's volume and density. Nearby, rather tall members of another impressive avant-metal band, Mastodon, thoughtfully stood against a wall, so as not to obscure anyone's view.
Throughout its set, Isis yoked the horsepower of heavy metal to the clockwork precision of industrial music, oiled with a doomy viscosity. Recent Neurosis may have set the table tonight, but Augustus Pablo and circa-'74 King Crimson were invited to the party. Even so, the band's undeniable complexity is surprisingly understated; its songs tend to feel as elemental and inevitable as tides and seasons. As on Panopticon, most songs in Isis's set were joined to the next by improvised interludes. The album's opening track, "So Did We," which careens from a whiplash-inducing introduction to stretches of mellow syncopation, was saved for the sole encore, after which Avalon's nasty security thugs manhandled everyone toward the exits -- the sole blemish on an otherwise mellow evening of heavy music.
Playlist:
Glen Phillips - Mr. Lemons (Umami)
Luka Bloom - Innocence (Cooking Vinyl)
Neil Young - Living with War (Reprise/Warner Bros., web stream per Felsenmusick)
AFI - sampler from Decemberunderground (Interscope)
MGR - Nova Lux (Neurot)
Isis - Live 4: Selections 2001-2005 (self-release)
Isis - Panopticon (Ipecac)
>(Newcomers to the band should start here and work backwards.)
Oh, you couldn't be wronger. Oceanic is their peak. And folks gotta check out the 2CD remix album.
Posted by: pdf | May 11, 2006 at 05:24 PM