ISIS - In The Absence Of Truth

The notion that a third album carries weight for a band's existence, credibility, and consecration is becoming, with the evolution of the notorious music business, an increasingly vague one — much like those legendary white crocodiles in the sewers — and today seems, at the very least, a theory worth revisiting.

Following the near-simultaneous release of their fourth live album (“Live 4: Selections 2001-2005”, Hydra Head) and last year's remix collection (“Oceanic: Remixes/Reinterpretations”, Hydra Head, featuring contributions from, among others, Justin Broadrick, Christian Fennesz and Mike Patton), Aaron Turner's Isis return with an album of new material two years on from “Panopticon” (Ipecac, 2004).

Relegating the excellent “Celestial” (Escape Artist, 2001) and its industrial litanies to an embryonic, not-yet-fully-defined phase, much like the circular guitars of “Sawblade” (Second Nature, 1998) and the out-and-out sludge of “The Red Sea” (Second Nature, 1999) — futuristic constructions nonetheless far from the majesty of the Ipecac period — Isis resume their excursions into the bleak wastelands that lie beyond metal, keeping the gap between themselves and most of today's scene virtually intact, with Mastodon, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Pelican and a handful of others excepted.

Welcomed as a disciple, and later as the foremost torchbearer, of the post-hardcore era inaugurated by Neurosis, Turner managed, with just two albums (“Oceanic”, 2002, and the aforementioned “Panopticon”, both released on Patton's label), to erect a grandiose, perpetually mutating sonic machine, capable of bending grind-jazz, psychedelic distortion, progressive unease and sludge accelerations to the jagged moods of a personality seething with rage, yet lucid enough to turn that discomfort into a manifesto.

With the shrewd contribution of Matt Bayles, co-producer of “Panopticon” and the recent “Blood Mountain”, the new course charted by Isis thus reaches its third checkpoint, deepening and expanding the atmospheres of their excellent 2004 record (which boasted, on the track “Altered Course”, a collaboration with Justin Chancellor of Tool), of which this “In The Absence Of Truth” seems to be a second part — autonomous in more than one respect, yet leaning further toward a more accessible listen, a dichotomy not unlike the impressions stirred by “10,000 Days” when heard with an album like “Lateralus” behind it.

Still, dwelling on pointless comparative speculation risks diverting attention from an immense album, decidedly longer than the 65 minutes shown on the display, studded with memorable moments (“Dulcinea”, “Not In Rivers, But In Drops”), disorienting ones (the cosmic suspension of “Firdous E Bareen”, the solemn finale of “Garden Of Light”), devastating ones (the body of “Holy Tears”), and crafted in every one of its thousand details with solutions that are always singular and bold.

Getting a little ahead of ourselves, it's undeniable that this feels like one of the best albums of the year — sincere, perhaps even more so than Agalloch's astonishing “Ashes Against The Grain”, and perfectly in line with the American band's anarchic ideology.

A long, slender, thread-like mechanism able to adapt to the band's sensibility — at times relaxed and atmospheric, like the closing credits of a film with an uncertain ending (the opening of the aforementioned “Firdous E Bareen”), at times aching (“Over Root And Thorn”), at other times refined and ruthlessly sludge (“Wrists Of Kings”).

The wrists of kings, a metaphor for the might with which they were forced to tame rebellious peoples or conquer new territories, open the album: “Wrists Of Kings” is a weave of hypnotic guitars perpetually on the verge of detonating (courtesy of a Mike Gallagher more disciplined than in his days with Converge and Cavity), suspended over an ambiguous loop that heightens its unease.

Isis dust off the solitary atmospheres of “Mosquito Control” (Escape Artist, 1998), folding in elements of Cavity and Mare, yet subjecting them to an unmistakable, thrilling style, equally perfect in reflective mode and in its sprawling version. Echoes of Neurosis (whom they supported on tour in 2000) and, naturally, Earth, along with a clear admiration for the Godflesh of friend and mentor Broadrick, sink into the abyss of “Not In Rivers, But In Drops” (the title perhaps alludes to the Brahmaputra, the sacred Indian river), a track worthy of the best Melvins.

Shards of imminent apocalypse explode and implode, in the manner of the first, inimitable Dredg, right through to ultimate dissolution.

Having weathered the initial impact of “In The Absence Of Truth” and its “Panopticon”-indebted prologue, “Dulcinea” completes an absolutely masterful preliminary picture. A manifesto-track, cerebral, viscerally torn between extremes and violent, epic at its peak, before calming down, just like the mysterious oceans the band sings about, only to return even more imperious, right up to the metal ecstasy of the finale.

Aaron Harris's powerhouse drumming, at times tribal, at times hyperkinetic, drives the passionate bacchanal before it dissolves into the panic-tinged sinister opening of “Over Root And Thorn”.

Rooted in nature, in its renewal as the direct revelation of the divine, the panic feeling of life is for Isis an ascetic noun that will lead us to total destruction, beyond root and thorn — here a Christian symbol, perhaps, or an esoteric one, as Delrio writes in his “Disquisitiones Magicae” (1599). In the enigmatic “1000 Shards”, the metaphysical concept of rebellion against immense forces, against the Leviathan already encountered amid the waves of “Oceanic”, solidifies into a track of candiru-like memory.

This is the album's purely elegiac moment, underpinned by the occult murmur of “All Out Of Time, All Into Space” and its dark mantric motions (which will return, in the form of a Gayatri invocation to the sun, in “Garden Of Light”), before the towering “Holy Tears”, with bassist Jeff Caxide very much in evidence on a track that at first glance seems heavily influenced by Steve Von Till's band.

Isis's spirituality, already hinted at during their Neurot period (“SGNL>05”, 2001), underlies the long instrumental track “Firdous E Bareen”, where Firdous — though this is only a guess — refers to the Madrasa Firdous, the Koranic school in the citadel of Aleppo, the historic heart and symbol of Syrian culture. Cliff Mayer, a fixture on electronics since “Oceanic” with only rare forays into guitar, crafts an anticlimactic variation that nicely sets up the extraordinary, intense “Garden Of Light” (just over 9 minutes). Isis's own hortus conclusus, where the Brahmins, supreme keepers of sacred knowledge, intone Vedic hymns to attain Illumination, is the fusion of the band's entire ideology: sludge outbursts reabsorbed into crystal-clear melodies, strangely optimistic moods, isolated and monolithic heavy peaks, growled inserts venting a total and totalitarian rage.

And the final four minutes of “In The Absence Of Truth”, almost as if wanting to contradict its fine title, seem to shed light on a mystical Truth probably only just brushed against, yet nonetheless present, and perhaps, one day, attainable.

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16/09/2006