They may play gigs at museums and name-check indie bands like Mogwai, but Isis still deliver some of the most devastatingly heavy metal available to modern man.
On the early evening of July 29, 2004, a heavy rumble could be heard emanating from an outdoor plaza near the intersection of First Street and Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Though at first it sounded like the beginnings of yet another Southern California earthquake, closer inspection revealed the reverberations to be the work of heavy-rock quintet Isis, who were previewing tracks from their third album, Panopticon—released three months later on Ipecac Records—outside of L.A’s Museum of Contemporary Art. As a small crowd of faithful fans and curious passersby looked on in entranced silence, drummer Aaron Future and bassist Jeff Caxide shook the concrete with a deliberate rhythm that was Brontosaurus-like in its gait; keyboardist Cliff Meyer bathed the plaza in ethereal washes of sound; and vocalist/lead guitarist Aaron Turner and second guitarist Mike Gallagher bounced their fuzz-drenched chords and echoing single-note trills off the surrounding skyscrapers. It was clearly not your typical rock gig. But then again, Isis aren’t your typical heavy-rock band.
“That MOCA gig was awesome!” enthuses Turner, several months later, as he chows down on a Mexican lunch in L.A.’s sleepy Atwater Village neighborhood. “This guy who works there, Robert Crouch, was curating a series of new music shows to go along with the museum’s exhibition on Fifties and Sixties minimalist art, and he was trying to find artists that had some sort of aural equivalent of minimalism in their music. All the other artists they chose were, like, electro-acoustic composers and abstract techno DJs. We were the only rock band to play the thing, so that was pretty cool.
“I’d love to be able to do something like that again,” Turner continues. “And honestly, if we were a band of a much larger stature, that’s totally the kind of shit we would do. We’d play five shows in the middle of the desert and make people come to see us, rather than us going to them. Unfortunately, it’s not all that practical. Maybe if we become a multi-Platinum-selling band, then we can indulge all of our fantasies like that.”
Isis might not yet be big enough to pull off a Pink Floyd–at-Pompeii-type of concert extravaganza, but don’t bet against them getting there someday. Since 1997, when Turner and Caxide put the band together in Boston, Isis have slowly but surely carved a solid niche for themselves in the ecosystem of underground heaviness. Though originally lumped in with the hardcore and doom-metal scenes, the band has long since transcended the musical boundaries of those genres with stunning albums such as 2000’s Celestial and 2002’s appropriately titled Oceanic. Panopticon steps out even further; produced by Matt Bayles (Mastodon, the Blood Brothers, These Arms Are Snakes), the hour-long, seven-track album features profoundly massive riffs layered with dreamy space-rock atmospherics and Turner’s anguished vocals. An album that you can bang your head and meditate to, Panopticon is a little like early Black Sabbath crossed with the disorienting psychedelia of early-Nineties shoegazers My Bloody Valentine.