ISIS (USA)
The American alternative rock titan ISIS is so difficult to put in any of the tight genre boxes of today that a single definition that would do full justice to this kind of music just doesn't exist. The band can be said to operate somewhere in the badlands of heavy progressive rock from where, every now and then, it breaks away and runs wild into inner and outer spaces somewhere far from here. But when ISIS starts playing, all that has ever been said about them feels like pig-ignorant oversimplification. ISIS takes the listener for a journey to somewhere to the outskirts of collapsing galaxies.
The story began in Boston in 1997. Back then, bands like Tool, Neurosis and The Melvins had developed their own idea of Northern American heavy metal into dimensions previously unheard of, and ISIS became part of the same continuum with its debut album Celestial, released in 2000. The next album Oceanic saw the band axing some of their earlier hardcore and metal influences and replacing them with long-lasting, sinuous, multipartite song structures. In want of a better genre name, Oceanic had the honour of being the first recording ever classified as post-metal. The polymorphism of this music is well illustrated by the album Remixes & Reinterpretations, where tracks from Oceanic are seamlessly re-processed by such names as Mike Patton and Venetian Snares. The followers Panopticon (2004) and In the Absence of Truth (2006) continued with refining the selected artistic style, but heaping the songs with extra layers and thickening the already thick composition of the frighteningly exquisite soundscape even more.
ISIS released its fifth studio album Wavering Radiant in May. The voyage towards the spacetime singularity point has only just begun.
www.isistheband.com
myspace.com/sgnl05
