Isis

Music critics tend to mark the birth of post-metal with two albums, both released in 1992. The first is "Pure" by Godflesh, Justin Broadrick's project, an industrial and sludge-metal record that, compared to its extraordinary predecessor "Streetcleaner", finds the Birmingham band working with a less murky, less searing sound, one that lingers in numerous noisy stretches of stasis closer to drone and noise music. The other is the third album by Neurosis, "Souls At Zero", on which the Californians led by Scott Kelly began drifting away from the crude hardcore-punk of their early days towards a path of experimental metal that often shuns simple structures, preferring to twist through convoluted routes full of arcane turns – an attitude that would eventually lead them to the masterpiece "Through Silver In Blood" (Relapse, 1996).

There are also those who point to an even earlier date for the birth of post-metal, namely 1991's "Bullhead" by Melvins, another album with a thunderous, oppressive sound, yet marked by pauses and expansions. In each of these cases, though, we're dealing with a post-metal that in a certain sense isn't yet conscious of itself as such, not yet codified – much as happened in post-rock with genre progenitors like Talk Talk or Slint, who were only given that label ex post.

In any case, these are three works that mark a before and an after, inspiring dozens of bands eager to combine metal's sonic firepower with richer, more intricate structures and developments – in other words, with post-rock. Inevitably, the sub-genres that would generate the most tributaries of post-metal are, thanks to their rhythmic traits and underlying imagery, industrial and sludge.

Looking closely, when the albums listed above came out, post-rock itself wasn't yet called that. The term was only coined in 1994, when music critic Simon Reynolds used it in his review of Bark Psychosis's "Hex". It was thus towards the end of the '90s that, with post-rock now having well-defined traits and a sizeable roster of affiliated bands (across the globe), numerous metal acts began, this time with full awareness and intent, to bring their massive, deafening sounds closer to those ideas of composition and song development.

Two labels in particular worked hardest to give post-metal a home: Philadelphia's Relapse (Don Caballero, Neurosis, Dillinger Escape Plan and many others), run by Matt Jacobson, and New Mexico's Hydra Head (Jesu, Boris, Dalek, Lustmord, Torche), led by none other than Isis frontman Aaron Turner.

Isis's career is in fact, thanks to the coherence of Turner's vision (both as producer and musician), an effective scale model of the history and evolution of post-metal.

Formed in Boston in 1997, Isis initially consisted of Aaron Turner (guitar and vocals), Jeff Caxide (bass) and Aaron Harris (drums), all coming from other bands on the local metal scene but weary of their previous experiences and eager to pursue more experimental paths. After a few early demos and EPs firmly rooted in extreme metal and hardcore, Isis experienced a genuine leap in quality when, towards the end of the millennium, they welcomed into the lineup Cast Iron Hike guitarist Michael Gallagher and Gersh keyboardist Bryant Clifford Meyer.

Although already pervaded by Clifford Meyer's substantial electronic contribution and dominated by dystopian, science-fiction overtones, the band's debut LP, "Celestial" (Hydra Head, 2000), is still strongly tied to "old-school" metal. Buoyed by the growing, enthusiastic buzz around "Celestial", Isis decided that for their subsequent work it would be wise to sign with a label with greater distribution capabilities. All die-hard Melvins fans, the band's members agreed to try their luck with their idols' own label, namely Mike Patton's Ipecac. One of the most forward-thinking and brilliant minds on the metal scene, the Faith No More frontman couldn't pass up an opportunity like this; the deal was signed without much fuss or discussion.

The first fruit of this new partnership was "Oceanic" (Ipecac, 2002), the album that truly shuffled the deck and firmly established the start of post-metal, inspiring and giving concrete direction to bands like Cult Of Luna, Pelican or Russian Circles (all openly indebted to Isis's shift in direction). While in "Celestial" the ambient moments of stasis, the relaxations and sudden explosions are confined to a few passages closing tracks like "Celestial (The Tower)" or "Deconstructing Towers", or serve as interludes between songs, in "Oceanic" they become central to the unfolding of the long tracks. By this point, Isis had become an almost fully-fledged post-rock band, one that nonetheless retained metal's heavy grain, explosive power, and Aaron Turner's forceful growl.

There's no doubt or dispute that "Oceanic" was the album with which post-metal and, simultaneously, Isis reached maturity. In technical terms, or in terms of genuine innovation, "Panopticon" (Ipecac, 2004) doesn't actually mark any step forward, beyond a further softening of the sound towards post-rock; it is, however, the album where Isis's formula is perfected and the band's conceptual imagery reaches its fullest realization – their masterpiece.

Where "Oceanic" centers on a dark individual story – the tragic tale of a man betrayed by his beloved in an incestuous relationship, who ends his life by drowning himself, with the water evoked by the title acting as a lethal, inescapable purifying agent – "Panopticon" is more ambitious, and through its dystopian metaphor embraces a more global vision, turning its desperate yet unflinching gaze towards society as a whole.

The title of Isis's third album takes its name from the Panopticon devised by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham at the end of the 18th century: a terrifying circular prison structure with a guard tower at its center, allowing the jailer to observe all the prisoners while the prisoners themselves can never know at any given moment whether they're being watched. In the liner notes, however, Bentham isn't the only thinker cited; Turner also references Michel Foucault's interpretation of the panopticon.

When, in interviews given to promote the album, Turner was asked where Isis's political outlook lay, the frontman was keen to clarify that the band was in no way politically oriented, though what emerges from the cryptic, symbolic lyrics of "Panopticon" was inevitably shaped by the state of things at the time. It's worth remembering in this regard that all of Isis's albums came out during George W. Bush's presidential terms; however, what worried Turner and the others wasn't so much the controversial, inadequate figure of the president, but rather the growing use of technology, particularly the internet, by the United States to surveil its citizens ever more invasively.

There's no better track to grasp the evocative, imaginative and destructive potential of Isis's post-metal than the one that opens "Panopticon". Seven and a half minutes titled "So Did We", brutally launched by a roaring riff that rages throughout the entire track, while still leaving room to breathe for Clifford Meyer, during which the keyboardist can work on smoky atmospheres, veiled textures, sketching out shadows and letting shafts of light cut through them. It's the ultimate realization of the interplay of contrasts, the alternation of loud and quiet that characterizes much post-rock (that of Mogwai, for instance, who not by chance often shared stages with Isis), made possible by the distance between Meyer's otherworldly atmospheres and the shattering power of Turner and Gallagher's metal guitars.

"Backlit" and "In Fiction" experiment with an evolution even closer to post-rock than "So Did We" already is. Both start quietly, sketching out a palpable tension through mournful sequences of arpeggios lost amid dark, enveloping effects, almost like pensive wanderers in a Dantean wood. When the moment comes to explode, though, Turner's growl bursts in alongside the guitar distortion – snarling and harsh, yet more melodic than on previous albums. While "Backlit" retains a more static structure in terms of tempo and imagery evoked, "In Fiction" makes use of its more than nine minutes to build into a seismic, menacing alternative-metal charge.

"Will Dissolve" is the shortest track on the record, and its job is to split it in two, playing out—amid supple twists of guitar arpeggios and the clattering rattle of struck instruments—almost like a tribute to the skeletal post-hardcore of masters Slint.

The cover of "Panopticon" is a shot of an indistinct American city drowned in a clinical blue photographic filter. It could have been taken by a surveillance drone or a military aircraft scouting ahead of an attack. With its convulsive alternation between guerrilla-style sludge riffs and broad atmospheric expanses—during which you get the impression of gliding at low altitude—"Syndic Calls" sets to music the spaces and the sense of danger captured by that icy artwork.

When the band went into the studio to record their third full length under the guidance of Matt Bayles (Pearl Jam, Mastodon, Soundgarden), Aaron Turner's main goal was to explore, more than ever before, expansive ambient spaces. To do so, each band member brought in the seeds of what would become the songs—small sketches or melodic lines to which the rest of the group would add the remaining material, as in a perpetual exploratory jam. This kind of process resulted in an album where every track was written by multiple hands, and the one conceived most collectively rather than—as had been the case on previous records—predominantly by Turner.

The track where this approach and the exploration of space become most evident is, fittingly, the longest one on the tracklist, "Altered Course", which falls just three seconds short of ten minutes. It's a long underwater suite, where metal dissolves and scatters its hard glimmer amid wave motions and dark depths. The rhythm section—joined for the occasion by their friend Justin Chancellor (Tool) on bass—stretches out its tempo and softens its touch, while the guitars coil into sinuous, plastic whirlpools to give life to an epic, solemn track.

The record's violent conclusion is entrusted to "Grinning Mouths", a song hardened by mammoth riffs and populated by terrible magistrates who dominate the dreams of the people—the moment on the album where the theme of control also reveals itself in all its cryptic lyrical power.

Without shading or fade-outs, it's on one of these stunning riffs that Isis pull the plug on their definitive masterpiece, an album destined from the outset to perfect the band's formula and bring post-metal to its complete codification.

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13/12/2020