Artist Profile

Isis

Nothing is true. Everything is permissible. - Hassan-i-Sabbah (attributed)

With a musical trajectory that spans nearly a decade, ISIS has emerged from the frozen recesses of New England to become an internationally renowned force in underground music. Critically revered as the vanguard of "art metal," the band has consistently exploded the idiomatic strictures that have traditionally defined heavy music, with each new release expanding and improving upon the innovations of its predecessor.

On the band's fourth full-length, In The Absence of Truth, the members of ISIS (vocalist/guitarist Aaron Turner, guitarist/keyboardist Clifford Meyer, bassist Jeff Caxide, drummer Aaron Harris and guitarist Mike Gallagher) have wed the post-psychedelic crush of 2000's Celestial to the extended instrumental passages and tension-escalating dynamics that have since become the band's sonic signature. Produced and recorded with the utmost clarity and fidelity by longtime ISIS co-conspirator Matt Bayles at the Bomb Shelter in downtown Los Angeles, In The Absence of Truth is a living, breathing panorama of soaring melodies, dizzying rhythmic ziggurats and seismic heaviness. Cyclical slow-motion bursts of kaleidoscopic notes ring out across orchestral guitar squalls as Meyer erects a wall of electronically-enhanced power-atmospherics and Caxide's mesmerizing sub-aquatic bass volleys spiral endlessly under the sweeping dirge and drone of the band's devastating triple-guitar ensemble. Throughout the album, Turner's vocals have assumed a decidedly cleaner, clearer quality than on previous releases, and Harris' drum work has become even more profoundly expansive and nuanced.

Conceptually, the album exists in a nebulous purgatory where elaborately constructed falsehoods pass for fact, where verity is relative to the purposes of those who invoke it, and where traditional notions of time and space are manipulated for purposes of psychic control. Harnessing influences that span nearly a thousand years' worth of literary and esoteric history, In The Absence of Truth merges the ancient with the modern in a non-linear conjuration of colluding elements.

All told, In The Absence of Truth is not only the latest zenith in ISIS' already impressive musical catalogue, but also a triumphant sonic apex unto itself.