The Door is a Hole to Another Door
Music Review: Isis/Pelican/Tombs - Montreal - June 6th, 2009
By Jo Satana
A long time no see and a swift kick back to the basics: straight up music review with a twist baby, I’m in a nostalgic mood.
Belated but hopefully appreciated, I’ve had the chance to witness the return of one of North America’s most influential noisemakers as far as the post-rock scene is concerned: Isis, in support of their newly released Wavering Radiant album.
June 6th at le National, a venue that has replaced many other audio speakeasys that used to haunt the trendy streets of uptown Montreal. Not really sure how I feel about the so nit gentrification that seems to be going on venue wise, but Le National has enough of that old world theatrical charm and natural acoustic vibe to attract competent promoters wanting to put on a massively ironic next world sound. That’s post rock for you.
So Tombs and Pelican opened this little ode to the wall of sound and if you happened to stay home, thinking that you’d appreciate a quiet night by yourself, little did you know that the vibrations you felt was not the arrhythmia caused by that shitty weed you’ve been smoking, it was the classic sonic steamroller, fucking up your mind.
But maybe you’re not keeping up with me: Tombs played a short and well received set, probably representing the most classical view of what people are used to hearing from a downtown metal show. Good people too from what I hear (I’m stalling here cause I completely missed their set).
Entering Le National at a little past nine, our awareness of the danger that lurked behind the speakers popped out it’s beautifully ugly head and just as soon Pelican finished their first sound check. Hopefully, some of you have had the chance to catch these guys on one of their headlining tours, ’cause I can assure you that none of their raw energy and attention grabbing bravado was missing from this amazing one hour set of intricate, delicate and loud axe madness. Even without a singer, Pelican painted a fantastic soundscape that really does not suffer from a lack of originality (which can be the case for these types of getups, their cover of post-rock gods EARTH was reason enough to show up early and soak up the atmosphere).
The real threat to this evening, however, was the tension that followed the end of Pelican’s set, up until Isis’s ballet of the stage.
Isis is essential oils oozing from the right place and at the right time, with enough balls to basically revisit what was already done with post-rock flavoring and turn it into a full blown edible apocalypse. Having seen them before and frankly, having my musical pallet forever changed since their first album, I decided to play it cool and not join in the hype race that preceded and followed the release of their newest album and their current tour.
Context break: ever since Where the Truth Likes (their previous release) surfaced, two camps formed. There are those who returned to their dark pits with their favorite Melvins and Neurosis albums, basically shunning the light that the Isis seemed to newly radiate, and there are those like me who were more accepting of the change of form the band was taking (albeit a inconsistently boring one). There were also the ever present rumors that the band was going to pack it up after the 2009 tour that made their new album that much more relevant.
While I’m not going to use this forum to review Wavering Radiant (but essentially, it’s not my most favorite thing in the world) I figured that I wasn’t going to hijack the June 6th show as a make it or break it love story with me. Never make up your minds kids and go with the flow, my own BS thrown back at me when I need to get out of a corner.
Isis took the stage, Isis killed, and Swan Song it may be. The mind-numbing, crushing set turned us all into puss-puking zombies. Without a doubt, something special and years ahead of an already poorly aging game. I was taken aback by how much I did not remember from my previous exposures to their low key, high impact madness. The set list covered their whole career in a (what seemed like) crescendo of tension and release that culminated in an amazingly orgasmic final piece that basically shames any of us for having questioned (haphazardly) their ability to ear fuck the planet, one city at a time.
I don’t know what the future holds for them and frankly I don’t really care. The future of post-rock-post-metal is one of death and rebirth as the genre seems to flicker in and out of audiophile memory (Neurosis), a cycle that mirrors that of the 80s, and the 90s. However, bands like Pelican seem well poised to take up some real estate pending the ultimate vacuum that would be left after implosion of Isis. But those of you who where sharing in what was witnessed at Le National, irrespective of the fact that there seemed to be an above normal concentration of hipsters, posers and allaround audio-geek jerkoffary going on that night, can sleep uneasily knowing that the haunting dreamscapes that were left after Isis quickly exited our field of cerebral vision will probably insert themselves in a final chapter and remain uneasily hungry for something that you know is too rare to be readily available anytime soon.
Good Night sleepy heads.
Joey-Jo-Jo Satana
Spanish horror film director Nacho Cerda spent the 90’s crafting a trilogy of half-hour horror shorts that, despite their being rarely seen on North American shores, marked his as a name worth watching in the future. The latter two films of that trilogy - the offensively nasty Aftermath and the beautiful, bittersweet Genesis - immediately garnered Cerda with a cult following, despite the fact that the absolute grotesqueness of Aftermath and the stigma of having made it would dog the director for years, making it difficult for him to finally get a full feature-length film project off the ground. That moment finally arrived with The Abandoned, and the result was well worth the wait.
