LIVE REVIEW: ISIS, MELVINS, TOTIMOSHI

Isis/Melvins/Totimoshi
Webster Hall
Friday, June 18

Farewell tours are weird, the celebratory nature of live rock being counteracted by the knowledge that this will never happen again; the listener can frequently walk away feeling weirdly hollow, as though the experience was somehow lessened by its unrepeatability. After 13 years and five albums (plus several EPs, a half-dozen or so live discs, a DVD, and dozens of austere, dignified T-shirts), the revered post-metal quintet Isis are calling it quits; their current U.S. tour is their final run of live dates. Their Friday night show at Webster Hall, which was followed by a Music Hall of Williamsburg gig Saturday night, was a concise summary of their artistic achievement—in effect, a final report on the work of the last decade-plus.

They launched the set with "Threshold of Transformation," the final track from 2009's Wavering Radiant. The drums were almost absurdly reverb-ed; live performance seems to bring out their prog-rock side, without the songs ever actually stretching. They sounded like Pink Floyd. Even the mammoth riff of "Collapse and Crush" (from their first album, 2000's Godflesh-besotted Celestial), couldn't break the numbed, drifting feel. If it wasn't for vocalist Aaron Turner's occasional roars, the seven-song set, which touched on their entire discography (two tracks each from Wavering Radiant and 2004's Panopticon, one each from Celestial, 2002's Oceanic, and 2006's In the Absence of Truth), would have been pure Gothic post-punk. The dominant bandmember wasn't Turner, but bassist Jeff Caxide, who seemed intent on turning every song into a cover of The Cure's "Fascination Street."

It's possible to have two drummers and still be rhythmically flaccid; the Grateful Dead managed it for decades. Not the Melvins, who've had both Dale Crover and Coady Willis behind side-by-side kits since 2006. Their set, which began and ended with taped music (the theme from Blazing Saddles and "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah," respectively), was one long, floor-shaking drum solo, with guitarist/vocalist Buzz Osborne (wearing what looked like an ankle-length robe with a turtleneck) and bassist Jared Warren (gladiator tunic and cape) throwing riffs and howls into the thunder here and there. Their set began with a death-march cover of Flipper's antiwar anthem "Sacrifice," then continued through an hour or so of mostly songs from their last three albums, all of which feature the four-piece/two-drummer lineup. Among the highlights were "The Water Glass," a military-cadence chant wedded to a huge, Led Zeppelin-esque riff, and "Pig House," which featured a surf-guitar break—both came from the brand-new The Bride Screamed Murder.

The first band of the night was Bay Area power trio Totimoshi, who played on the Melvins' equipment and served as their roadies. Guitarist/singer Tony Laureano has a rough, clenched voice like a Latino Scott "Wino" Weinrich, with a guitar tone that's somewhere between Helmet and Hendrix. He and bassist Meg Castellanos create a loose, bluesy groove, with drummer Chris Fugitt hammering the floor into place beneath them. Two of their six songs were instrumentals; the rest could easily have been, too, because the riff and the groove were what it was all about.

[From the Village Voice.]

INTERVIEW WITH THE MELVINS

I interviewed Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover of the Melvins backstage at New York's Webster Hall on Friday night, an hour or two before they went onstage opening for one of Isis's final shows. Here's the video.



The show was terrific; the Melvins' set was like one long drum solo punctuated with the occasional guitar riff or shout from Osborne. Opening act Totimoshi was a heavy power trio, somewhere between '70s blues-rock and '90s noise-rock. And Isis sounded really good, too, playing a tight seven-song set that touched on all five of their studio albums. I'll have a longer review tomorrow on the Village Voice site.

ISIS: GOING DOWN FOR THE THIRD TIME

I'm going to see the final New York Isis show tonight. (They're playing Brooklyn tomorrow night, but because I ride NJ Transit, I can't go to shows in Brooklyn—can't make it back to Penn Station in time to catch a train home—so Brooklyn shows don't count, in my mind. Which makes it all the more annoying when bands I want to see only play Brooklyn, and not Manhattan.) It'll be my third time seeing them.

I first saw Isis live a decade ago (October 15, 2000, to be exact), opening for the now-defunct Seattle band Botch at the now-defunct venue Brownies. I was there to see Botch; their final full-length, We are the Romans, was one of the most amazing records I'd ever heard, mixing metal, hardcore, and crazy guitar solos that sounded like an exploding Nintendo game into something that was, at that time, pretty new. It would, of course, turn out to be massively influential in the coming years; there was a stretch there where if you paid enough attention to certain subgenres, it was hard to find a band not blatantly cribbing from Botch, or Cave In.



I'd heard Isis's first full-length, Celestial, before coming to the show. (My friend Gordon ran Escape Artist, the label it came out on.) It was a sort of sludgy industrial-doom record, very clearly influenced by early Godflesh, but with a greater focus on hypnotic, repetitive riffing. They almost seemed like they wanted to lull the listener into a trance—at a low volume, under the right circumstances, the album could put me right to sleep. I liked it, though.

The show was completely different from the album. I mean, yeah, they were playing songs from it (and from their earlier EPs Mosquito Control and The Red Sea, which at that point I hadn't heard), but there was an element of exploration that was absent from the recordings. At one point, the loud guitars and pounding, looplike tribal drums gave way to a duet for theremin and didjeridoo. I came away surprised and really impressed. I'd heard something really new.



Isis got bigger and bigger as the years went on, becoming a mid-sized cult act and poster boys for "post-metal," a term that always came off to me like the people using the term considered metal something to be evolved out of. Like Botch and Cave In, they became a touchstone for younger bands, with critics attaching the shorthand name "NeurIsis" to a subgenre that seemed rooted in imitation of their work and that of Neurosis. I liked their second album, Oceanic, even more than Celestial, and the double disc of remixes, Oceanic: Remixes/Reinterpretations, was great. But the two albums after that, Panopticon and In the Absence of Truth, seemed boring and gray to me, like they'd run out of ideas and were falling back on habitual stylistic gestures. Panopticon in particular just felt like a rehash of Oceanic. Here's the repetitive, trancelike guitar riff; here's the roared verse and crooned chorus; here's the tribal drumming. Their music was so resolutely un-hooky, so focused on cumulative effects rather than individual moments of catharsis, that listening to it was like walking through a fog bank. And their visual style—abstract imagery and a generally impersonal, the-artist-is-not-present vibe—only served to distance me even more from their work. I felt like they were going out of their way to sound like one big roaring thing, rather than a group of people making music collectively, and as someone who likes small-group jazz and rock bands that prioritize interaction, I was having trouble maintaining interest.



I went to see them a second time in 2007, for their tenth anniversary tour, with Jesu opening, and was bored to the point of annoyance by both acts. I left early. So I'm curious what the feeling will be like at tonight's show. It's a kind of pre-emptive nostalgia, obviously—Isis announced their breakup immediately before the start of this tour, and bandleader Aaron Turner has postmortemed the band's catalog online. But Isis's music doesn't lend itself to celebratory exultation, so an "Irish wake" atmosphere is unlikely. I'm kind of thinking it'll be vaguely somber, as the band plods through an hour and a half or so of looping, hypnotic songs that I can barely tell apart. (I tried listening to one album a day this past week, to re-familiarize myself with their catalog, but gave up after the first two days.) Granted, the band's 2009 studio album, Wavering Radiant, was a comeback of sorts, with a newly organic and progressive-rock-informed sound, but the songs still aren't singalongs or anything. So I guess it'll be up to opening acts the Melvins and Totimoshi to bring the actual rock, and Isis will be giving the whole thing "event" status.

HIGH ON FIRE POLISHES ITS METAL WEAPONRY

[From the SF Weekly.]

Oakland's (and possibly Earth's) heaviest band, High on Fire, is ready for its close-up. The trio's fifth studio album, Snakes for the Divine, is its first for the E1 label after several years on highly regarded metal imprint Relapse. The musicians also worked with a real producer for the first time in years.

On Snakes, the band's sound was shaped by Greg Fidelmann, who has worked on such high-profile metal discs as Metallica's Death Magnetic and Slayer's World Painted Blood. "He's actually a producer producer," says guitarist and vocalist Matt Pike, contrasting Fidelmann with Steve Albini and Jack Endino, who worked on 2005's Blessed Black Wings and 2007's Death Is This Communion respectively. "Greg's a lot more hands-on."

The result is High on Fire's cleanest, most accessible album to date. Of course, the members keep their trademarks. Pike's vocals are a hoarse roar somewhere between Motörhead's Lemmy and the Melvins' Buzz Osborne with throat polyps, and the rhythm section of bassist Jeff Matz and drummer Des Kensel thunders like an avalanche. But each instrument occupies its own space, with room for subtle ornamentation. And Pike's guitar, one of the fiercest and most punishing axes in modern metal, has moments of surprising clarity. Indeed, from the album's first few moments, it's obvious this is a new stage in High on Fire's evolution — even if the title track begins with a high-pitched, buzzing riff that's naggingly similar to AC/DC's "Thunderstruck."

Pike laughs and owns up to the borrowing. "Not intentionally, but yeah, I kinda lifted a little bit of that," he says. "I thought it was so cool, and it's such a fun thing to play."

For the rest of its eight-minute running time, the song is a vintage High on Fire gallop, riffs landing like body blows from a 9-foot-tall steroid abuser. The album is jammed with the band's longest and most punishing songs (five pass the six-minute mark, and two run more than eight minutes). It also offers greater variation from the High on Fire crew. "How Dark We Pray" and "Bastard Samurai" are slower than anything the band has recorded since its 2000 debut, The Art of Self-Defense. "Every now and then it's good to slow down some," Pike acknowledges. "Jeff and I had a really wide span of tempos."

Pike is busy preparing for the band's first headlining U.S. tour in several years. "The way our management and booking agents are, they want us opening constantly," he says genially. Indeed, the group has been the first act of choice on Megadeth's 2008 Gigantour outing and on the recent Dethklok and Mastodon co-headlining tour, but Pike would like the chance to play for an hour straight for a change.

He'd also like to play fresh material this time out. "I'm two-thirds of the way through learning all of 'em so I can play and sing 'em live," he says of the new songs. "We're still working out the quirks. But by the time March rolls around, I'm pretty confident everybody will have their end of things in order."