Isis - A post-rock holocaust

Boston's Isis belong to a fairly tight-knit scene that's hard to pin down, straddling metal, post-rock and post-hardcore. There are countless labels for their music, often misleading ones: post-metal, post-core, post-sludge; almost all of them are either inaccurate or off the mark, so this writer believes it's more important to first understand where this phenomenon comes from—a phenomenon that, over the years, has written some important pages in the history of high-volume music.

In the early '90s the metal scene was in constant ferment: alongside the main currents of extreme metal at the time—gothic (inaugurated by pioneers Paradise Lost), black metal, stoner, and the technical death metal of Death, Cynic and Atheist—more or less isolated cases of metal bands with strong noise-rock, industrial and hardcore influences began to emerge. Such was the case with the industrial metal of Godflesh (offspring of the brutality of early Swans), the sludge metal of Melvins, Today Is The Day (who added grind and gothic-metal elements to the noise-hardcore of their early records), and, most important for the development of the scene under discussion here, Neurosis. Steve Von Till's band proved decisive, not only as the emblem of the shift from hardcore sounds to essentially metal music, but for having laid out, with the landmark "Through Silver In Blood", the coordinates of a hybrid genre that, while harnessing the power of the most uncompromising metal, opened itself up to industrial contamination and near-ambient stretches. The album arrived at just the right moment and shook the genre to its foundations, so much so that the owner of Hydra Head Records (which has more recently put out albums by bands like Pelican and Jesu), Aaron Turner, was struck by its innovative charge and, together with bassist Jeff Caxide and drummer Aaron Harris, founded Isis, with the intent of producing a heavy, suffocating form of metal that would fuse the insights of Neurosis with those of other illustrious forerunners (the aforementioned early Melvins and Godflesh, and later Tool and Mogwai); music steeped in an ocean of despair and anguish, rendered through stretches bordering on doom and a constant cycle of implosions and explosions.

Isis's music is all like this: you either love it or you hate it. Through the form of the concept album and waves of decibels, it gives voice to the drama of Aaron Turner, an incurable pessimist tormented by the smallness and fragility of humankind in the face of everything: technology (Celestial), feelings (Oceanic), or society (Panopticon). For better or worse, you don't come out of an Isis album unscathed: theirs is devastating, direct music that leaves the listener bleeding. Their concepts are as futuristic as they are truthful and timely: running through them is a perpetual "titanic" struggle between humanity and technology, a struggle lost from the very start, one that can only end with the individual's submission to the collective, or with suicide; the quality of the lyrics deserves particular mention, as simple and direct as they are rich in intriguing symbolism and references.

Isis would only arrive at the expansive, wide-ranging form of metal they're usually associated with after a long period of maturation, one rooted in the darkest, most rotten corners of that hybrid metal mentioned above. From the band's earliest sessions came the four-song EP Mosquito Control, a work of undeniable sonic and emotional impact: the atmosphere is extremely tense, with heavy guitars driving hammering, destructive tracks. "Poison Eggs" opens the record under the banner of a putrid industrial metal, with pounding basslines and long guitar wails; on "Life Under The Swatter", by contrast, the human dimension fades away, smothered by a deafening wall of noise. These are tracks with no center of gravity, over which unsettling, chaotic phrases are repeatedly screamed. Brutal and raw as it is, early Isis's music is more cerebral than one might expect (on "Hive Destruction", the record's high point, you can already glimpse the seeds of future developments, while "Relocation Swarm" features samples and a long dissonant coda).

The EP doesn't go unnoticed in the underground metal scene: a second guitarist, Mike Gallagher, joins the lineup, and Isis get noticed by Converge, with whom they'll go on to share a tour.

After this live experience, Isis return to the studio a year later and record The Red Sea, an EP that marks a further step toward maturity: the sound has become more compact, monolithic and abrasive. The almost industrial cadences of "Charmicarmicat Shines To Earth" are striking, as are the ferocious, self-destructive "The Minus Times" and the fitful "Lines Across Eyes", with atomic explosions interspersed with stops and dead air. It's the most extreme work in the band's entire catalogue, and even shows the influence of the new metalcore currents of the time, yet it lacks personality: their emancipation from their models has yet to come.

That same year the lineup is completed with the addition of Clifford Meyer on electronic keyboards, while the band's popularity grows to the point that they're asked to support Neurosis on tour. This period also sees the release of the limited-edition EP Sawblade, featuring two new (fairly forgettable) tracks and two covers: "Streetcleaner", the Godflesh classic (which holds its own against the original, without quite matching it), and Black Sabbath's "Hand Of Doom" (sung by Meyer). It's undoubtedly a minor, skippable release.

Isis are finally ready to make their first LP, Celestial, which completes the concept begun on the first EP, Mosquito Control, enriching it with apocalyptic, futuristic settings. This time the central theme is the "Control Tower", a mechanical-technological entity built to control humanity and complete its evolutionary process, one in which every single individual becomes part of an organism with a collective intelligence, like a hive.

This time the tempos slow down: immensely heavy riffs follow one another like hammer blows amid constant drum kicks and repetitive, agonized screams; "Celestial (The Tower)" is, in this respect, the album's manifesto. Throughout the record, what makes the difference are the electronic touches crowning music that's extremely heavy and massive, almost doom, interspersed here and there with lighter, cleaner interludes that are nonetheless far from relaxed; this is, after all, extremely tense music, into which not a single ray of sunlight penetrates.

Tracks of absolute ferocity like "Glisten" and "Swarm Reigns (Down)" (with clear echoes of Godflesh) follow one another, slowly paced out by extremely heavy, dissonant guitars: some have called it "sludge-metal", a label that, while too tight a fit for the band's later records, suits this album's music well: imposing, restless, unstoppable, a river of molten magma.

The masterpiece is "Decostructing Towers", an explosive instrumental in which Turner and Gallagher's guitars chase each other for over seven minutes, culminating in a cacophonous feedback coda, never allowing a single second to catch your breath; "Collapse and Crush" simply reaffirms everything said so far at a more measured pace; "C.F.T. (New Circuitry And Continued Evolution)" offers up a poignant, elegant guitar melody, while the closing "Gentle Time" (outro aside) returns to the wall of sound of the preceding tracks.

Taken individually, almost all the tracks are very strong; the record's flaws lie in its redundancy and its partial lack of personality: Isis made a substantial, high-quality album, but one that doesn't push much further than the sum of its influences.

On Celestial, Isis show superior dramatic range, with a sci-fi concept that fits perfectly into the era of mass communication, and which partly makes up for the uncertainties still noticeable at the compositional level.

The SGNL > 05 EP contains remixes (one of them by Justin Broadrick, mastermind of Jesu) and mostly instrumental unreleased tracks along the lines of Celestial. Recommended only to fans.

Meanwhile the band's fame grows, enough to catch the attention of Mike Patton's Ipecac, which will release Isis's subsequent work.

The real leap in quality comes precisely with Oceanic, which reveals a less extreme band, though no less intense or aggressive for it. Little remains of their early days, but this coincides with an impressive maturation: by now Isis are no longer mere imitators of Neurosis and Godflesh, their style exploits the versatility of post-rock, weighing it down and drowning it in the blindest despair. The clearest sign of change is Turner's voice, by now comparable only to itself and more compelling than ever. A literal growl: the roar of a man overflowing with rage, screaming the world's ills at his fellow man, one of the most intense voices of the last decade.

At the center of the concept this time is love, which can only be suffering, tormented, agonizing, and ends with the suicide by drowning – suggested by the lyrics and the title – of a lover betrayed by his woman, in an incestuous relationship.

As the record delves deeper, the atmosphere grows ever darker, the air grows thin: the opening chords of "The Beginning And The End" are soon swept away by waves of noise, which return ever fuller and more thunderous in "The Other", the most sickly, self-destructive track on the record. "False Light" picks up the structure of the previous track, introducing clean guitar parts that emerge from the chaos of noise and distortion, but there's nothing soothing about it: the story of Oceanic allows for no form of redemption.

After discovering the affair with "the other", only death awaits the protagonist: "And the water takes hold / Fills his lungs and crushes his body", go the lyrics of "Carry".

After two short instrumentals, the drama returns in the long "Weight", extremely slow and accompanied by keyboards and a female voice. The closing "From Sinking" and "Hymn" are the final devastating blows, corresponding respectively to the protagonist's death and epitaph. With the lines "Blank memory washed away / Swallowed whole through eyes and teeth", one of the most harrowing, intense works of recent years comes to a close: there is no peace, these songs seem to tell us, except in death.

The weight of this record is still felt today, as bands like Pelican and Cult of Luna seem to prove.

Two years later, in 2004, George W. Bush is re-elected, sparking disappointment and disapproval among all those who had hoped for change, artists included. Turner is among them, and he decides to record an album with a more ambitious conceptual scope, one that would express his outrage without falling into the usual populist, demagogic lyrics of the wave of anti-Bush bands. These sessions give birth to Panopticon.

The concept behind the album is the most mature the band had put forward so far: it draws on a circular prison design conceived in the eighteenth century (called the "Panopticon", precisely), in which a single observer at the center could keep watch over the cells arranged around the outer circumference. It isn't hard to apply this prison to today's reality, and thus grasp the unease Turner voices with such anger and clarity toward a society that is oppressive and intrusive toward the individual.

Musically, the record continues the natural evolution of their sound, shedding certain roughness and smoothing out the edges. Panopticon's sound is no longer metal, but rather a post-rock with "elephant-like" cadences, certainly less abrasive but far more elegant and atmospheric. The more violent moments are still there, but they're not what the band leans on; instead it relies on interwoven guitars and keyboards and some evocative spatial expansions. Of the more extreme genres like post-hardcore and metal, only the voice remains (hoarse and rock-solid, though more melodic than their usual standard) along with a few extremely steep walls of guitar.

"So Did We" is the album's masterpiece, a track with perfect formal balance and an unstoppable drive. "Backlit" goes even further, perfectly alternating expansions and contractions, building up a frightening tension that finds its release in the liberating screams that close the track. The more polished "Wills Dissolve" opens with an almost liquid synth passage and a slow guitar melody that rises in dizzying surges, almost like waves breaking against rocks. "In Fiction" progressively builds an architecture of interwoven guitars that rise until they explode and then collapse in on themselves; "Syndic Calls" picks up the aggression of the first two tracks and stretches it out, culminating in an apocalypse. In "Altered Course", the most post-rock track on the record, special mention goes to its ambient/psychedelic coda (thanks to Meyer's keyboards, increasingly prominent in the band).

With Panopticon Isis become known worldwide, while various bands attempt to imitate (and sometimes further explore) their formula, without ever reaching their expressive heights.

A cast of alternative music stars (Fennesz, James Plotkin, Tim Hecker, Oktopus, Mike Patton, Venetian Snares, Justin Broadrick…) signs on to remix Oceanic, which will be collected in 2005 on the double album Oceanic: Remixes Reinterpretations. The results range from decent to embarrassing.

After a two-year wait, In The Absence Of Truth arrives, again on Ipecac, the long-awaited follow-up to Panopticon.

Expectations were sky-high: a change of course was more than necessary to avoid the band stagnating, risking getting nailed to the formula it had arrived at and losing credibility. Unfortunately these expectations are only partly met, and what Isis deliver to the press is little more than a polished, trimmed-down, more expansive version of their Panopticon.

From the very first tracks you can sense the band's compositional fatigue: still capable of crafting good songs, but scarcely daring and short on ideas. The opening track "Wrists Of Kings" is a bland, formulaic piece that pales next to its counterpart on the previous record, while "Dulcinea" does its job thanks to an explosive ending, even if it's nothing particularly original.

From here on the album starts to show its seams: Isis play on expansiveness, following a well-established but rather overused formula that they sometimes master ("Over Root And Thorn") and sometimes don't ("Garden Of Light"); while some tracks hold up well on their own, the record as a whole suffers from excess length and flatness, and the fine tribal drumming à-la Tool (with whom Isis shared a tour) isn't enough to lift the album above average. And amid songs that taste of nothing but watered-down broth ("Holy Tears"), a few bright spots emerge, like "Not In Rivers But In Drops", the most violent track on the record, and also one of the best in their whole catalogue.

What saves the album once again is its depth: with In The Absence Of Truth, Isis add further substance to their music, crafting an ever more ambiguous and hermetic concept around the ideas of truth and perception; from this point of view the band remains well above average, even when the music itself fails to take off.

Around the same time Isis collaborated with Scotland's Aereogramme, giving birth to In The Fishtank 14, a rather subdued work that blends sprawling post-rock with murkier atmospheres. On "Delial" the Isis of Panopticon seem to resurface, while the more expansive "Stolen" boasts a very elegant instrumental coda, built from a bed of drones and faint electronic disturbances. All in all, a marginal record in the band's discography, one that finds them seemingly short on ideas.

Red Sparowes are a supergroup that also features members of Isis. Their 2005 debut, At The Soundless Dawn, is a textbook guitar-driven post-rock record, with some valid and moving moments, while the follow-up Every Red Heart Shine Towards The Red Sun rounds up the genre's stereotypes without offering a single episode worth remembering.

After three years Isis return with their fifth studio LP, Wavering Radiant (2009), attempting to confirm their status as one of the leading bands in contemporary heavy music. It's a reasonably successful operation, given the imagination and range of ideas the Boston band employs to escape the clichés of that post-metal they helped invent but which today is more stagnant than ever. Indeed, this record seems on one hand to sharpen its edges with an extremely violent sound (even by their standards), and on the other to streamline the excessive sprawl of the previous album, delivering their most accessible record, one that, in terms of approach, sides more with progressive than with post-rock.

True sonic sieges like "Hall Of The Dead", in fact, are driven as much by Meyer's organ as by walls of guitars, and are dotted with ambient oases rather than following the well-worn paths of emotional crescendos. "Ghost Key" stands out as one of the finest pieces of their career, a composition enriched by electronics, refined guitar interplay and a rhythmic emphasis never heard before from the five-piece; all without ever abandoning those heavy explosions that have by now become an Isis trademark, and which permeate above all the ten minutes of "Hand Of The Host".

Despite a few changes, anyone who has loved Isis will find things largely in place, with the exception of Turner's voice, which is now almost always clean and clear, save for a few passages sung in growl (increasingly metal, and increasingly far from the hardcore screaming of their early work). But this is where the problems surface: if until now the vocals were an almost secondary element in the Isis alchemy, with this new singing style they become increasingly prominent, exposing the shortcomings of a rather limited voice. This, along with a few other flaws - the length, the presence of some dead spots in the longer tracks - weakens an otherwise beautiful record, superbly played and produced, especially in the bass department. Indeed, after a listless and inconclusive "Stone To Wake A Serpent", Isis deliver two of the best tracks on the album ("20 Minutes / 40 Years" brings back the glories of "Panopticon"!), restoring the right dose of color and variety with interweaving guitars and shifting scenes amid an ocean of distortion and small pockets of delicacy.

To this day, Isis can boast (ups and downs notwithstanding) a solid career, and deserve a place of real respect among the leading artists of the decade's first half, having helped a whole scene take root which, however self-indulgent or ponderous it may sometimes seem, produced some fine records and built a cohesive, unified scene.

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