Pin a single label, style, adjective on Isis and it slips right off. They seem immune. For more than a decade, the Los Angeles five-piece has maneuvered between cries and whispers, dirt and polish, bruising noise and narcotic subtlety, repeatedly redrawing the borders of the one genre that accommodates them, metal, as they annex more sonic territory beyond it. This means trading metal's usual symphony of downtuned riffs for a broader set of digressions and moods: On new album Wavering Radiant, these self-professed Fennesz and Pink Floyd devotees have turned often-drab contemporary guitar rock into music flush with fresh emotions and ideas-- a triumph that owes to the casual restraint of Joe Barresi's production. Moving away from the analytic approach favored by longtime Isis producer Matt Bayles, collecting the entire band in one place, and writing without a deadline has lent Radiant a sense of completeness and unity that recalls album-rock's golden years.
Wavering Radiant continues the shifts made on 2006's In the Absence of Truth-- namely, more elaborate sonics and increased rhythmic variety-- while also emphasizing the finer points of tempo and, especially, melody. Melodicism not only adds a new dimension to Isis' music but another way to raise the tension, by silhouetting those melodies against their slabs of dissonance. As singer Aaron Turner told MTV, the potent, parallel forms of their past work-- one instrument tailing the other-- gave way in Absence to a flowing conversation of instruments. The effect there, and more so here, is a veto on thickness for the sake of thickness: The mix instead is stacked with accents and pairings that surprise and complement one another rather than feel redundant.
Equally vital to the record's dense, hypnotic shape is Clifford Meyer's command of the keyboard. Lingering organ lines seep into the pores and cracks of each track, leaving tiers of texture that brighten up the dark spots. For the most part, Meyer is more active than that though: His blissful, knotty phrases, played on a dusty Hammond B3 or Rhodes, often recreate moments from the psychedelic and prog-rock past. Along the same lines, the title track and the effects-laden finale "Threshold of Transformation" capture this feeling of retro reverie. Whether it is this brand of low-key ambience or the rhythm section's siege attack, these songs are spread across the entire dynamic range, starting with an enveloping, ruthlessly direct low end.
That solidity comes at the start: "Hall of the Dead" may be the lushest, most astutely crafted opener in the Isis discography. Fans of their earlier work will welcome the jerky first riff, but soon the grind of Celestial (2001) or the Mosquito Control EP (1998) fades away, leaving the track bobbing in sludge. Harris doesn't take it lying down, drawing menace and beauty in equal parts from his kit. Turner works similar wonders-- his clearer-than-ever voice stands out at times over the murky compositions while blending into the loud, surrounding dark at others. Not that you can understand everything he says. On the first track, the pattern of bellows and roars calls to mind Nancy and Lee's "Some Velvet Morning", except Turner makes it a one-man duet. The brawny thump of "Stone to Wake a Serpent" has him belting in both his clean and hoarse styles, too, and though the words are unintelligible, the multiple personalities of his voice nicely mirror the guitar's many incarnations on that track-- crunchy explosions of fuzz, depressed twangs, banshee shrieks.
Track for track, Wavering Radiant is the smartest and richest record in Isis' catalog: Here they manage not just to build on, but also to inventively weld together, their past work into one interlocking whole. Naysayers who cast off In the Absence of Truth as too subdued ought to don their headphones again: There was a sense of fastidious craft and atmosphere that may take repeated spins to sink in. And the same goes for the far superior Wavering Radiant. Easily the band's most accessible effort, hipsters and headbangers will likely agree it's also their most intricately imagined. To luxuriate in the details, to fully receive the melodies and tones and the bewildering interplay of every element, Isis demand not merely active, not athletic, but something like Olympic listening.
