ISIS + Jesu @ Le National

By Omar Goodness - Hooked On Sonics - 03/18/2007

Aaaaaaand chalk up another missed opener due to trying to find parking. While circling the surrounding area around Le National for like a good half-hour in an ill-fated attempt to find parking, I ended up missing Zozobra, a new noise-rock band featuring Caleb Scofield of "indefinitely hiatused" Cave-In. Apparently not much of a big loss to me, as I heard Zozobra wasn't much to write home (or you) about, and to be honest, their debut CD didn't leave too big an impression on me either.

After finally finding parking, I made it into the venue just as Jesu took the stage. I'm a big fan of ex-Godflesh genius Justin Broadrick's new band that combines slow tempos, thick sheets of detuned guitars with a nice coating of melody over it. It basically sounds like a slower, more depressing version of one of my all-time faves, post-hardcore space rockers Hum (a comparison that apparently is pretty common, as after their recent SXSW performance, the house soundman apparently started playing Hum over the PA). Looking forward to hearing how Broadrick and crew would pull off the thick, expansive and dense sound he's crafted on record, as soon as I got closer to the stage, things looked...wrong.

Touring as only a trio -- when he had previous toured with a five-person backing band -- I was a little surprised. How was he gonna recreate the loud guitar walls, or the melodic keyboards with just himself on guitar, a bassist, and a drummer? Then I thought, "OK, maybe it'll be interesting stripped down". Boy was I wrong. Rather than attempting a more stripped-back sound, Broadrick was relying on member #4, the "mighty" laptop at stage-left, to fill the sound. While I have no problems with laptops in bands, it got a little tedious when the laptop turned out to not just be another instrument in the mix, but rather a machine providing HALF of the sonic wallop (further breaking my heart was watching Broadrick motion to the sound guy to turn up the laptop in the mix... sigh). Probably the biggest letdown of the whole performance was watching him let the laptop provide the guitar feedback bursts on "Friends Are Evil", a trick that could be easily reproduced live, and would have sounded phenomenal. Instead, let the laptop take care of it.

While songs like "Silver" sounded as good as they did on record, it just seemed extremely fake as the entire backing tracks were being provided by the laptop with the band playing along with it like some sort of Franken-karaoke. There's only so much you can take watching Broadrick strum out one dirgey chord after another, letting ye ole laptop fill the rest of the space while he's all slumped over his axe, probably all Quaaluded up. With the exception of some fantastic drumming by Intronaut's Danny Walker, the whole performance felt pointless. If Broadrick didn't want to get a larger touring band, it would have been pretty neat to see what he could have done by restructuring Jesu's dense songs into a tight power trio set-up. Instead, the performance was a letdown and the more I go through it in my head post-show, the whole thing was just very, very disappointing from a band that released one of 2007’s best albums so far with Conqueror.

After a brief soundcheck on some guitars, ISIS took the stage and started off with "Wrists of Kings", the leadoff track off of their latest CD In the Absence of Truth. Now, it's common knowledge around CJLO that I was not a fan of their latest (it was one of my "disappointments of 2006") and I was curious to see how much I'd hate their performance and feared how much of it would be peppered with tracks from said album. Luckily, the songs they did play from In Absence... were the few that didn't annoy me that much, and surprisingly the live performances sounded a lot better than they did on record. Also, pretty much all the things that bothered me about In Absence... were rectified live. The tribal/jungly/tom-heavy drumming? It was still there, but it sounded more crisp live, and was less grating. The clean singing? Still there too, but it seemed like Aaron Turner’s voice wasn't as nasally as it is on the CD, and he also had echo and light distortion effects on it, which made it more bearable. The funked-up bass? Yeeeeah, that was still there, and still annoying, but not so present -- when they kicked off the bass intro of "Not in Rivers But in Drops", my sigh was so audible it produced some nice dirty looks from two dudes next to me... sorry dudes. That being said, the performances of the newer songs did make me go home and pull out that record again to give it another chance --yeah... it failed... again -- so if you aren't a fan of the new album, I still recommend you go catch them live.

The highlight of the evening was a great performance of the acclaimed Oceanic's "False Light", with the band sounding at their most crushing. For every bellow Turner let loose, the echo effect on his vocals made it seem like the hall itself was yelling right back at him; it was truly amazing. Closing out the set with what I guess is the closest ISIS has to a hit song, the fantastic "In Fiction" from Panopticon, they ended up having some extra time and came back on stage while the PA was playing music (the usual sign of "yeah, it's over... go home"). Turner walked up to the mic and said "Hey, I guess we do have time for one more... thanks for coming out!" and the band launched into a great and welcomed version of the title track off of their amazing first full-length album Celestial (the Tower).

All in all, while Jesu was a complete utter disappointment, ISIS was a pleasant surprise. The new songs sounded OK live, good even, and the older ones were performed flawlessly. It was interesting to see a band whose catalogue is built on songs that probably form from open-ended structures and jams be so tight and precise, yet still not lose any of that unpredictability in a live setting. Broadrick could stand to learn a lesson or two from the very same people he's influenced.

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