IN THE ABSENCE OF TRUTH

Less aggressive and raw than the well-known and successful "Oceanic" and "Panopticon", Isis adds in "In the Absence of Truth" (2006), their fourth album, more elaborate and melodically complex structures, almost as a natural consequence of their musical maturity, and which has in "The House of Leaves" (2000) by the New York writer Mark Danielewski, a novel that combines terror, satire and love in unconventional narrative dimensions, its inspirational reference and thematic axis.

There is thus a special attention from the band to expand their sonic universe and add some nuances with the more prominent percussive contribution of Aaron Harris and the incorporation of clean vocals in the generally guttural ranges of Aaron Turner accompanying the over-saturated guitar riffs of Mike Gallagher, as in the opening and soaring "Wrists Of Kings", also with Jeff Caxide's most notorious bass lines in the choking and ferocious "Not In Rivers, But In Drops" and in the anguished melancholy of "Dulcinea", whose stormy final stretch with the full band is surely one of the album's best.

True to their bleak experimental streak, the Bostonians also generate toxic and thick specters of sound to envelop Gallagher's distorted guitars on the extended intro of "Over Root And Thorn" and the hypnotic, watery "1000 Shards", and then digress, from Bryant Cliff Meyer's electronic contributions, into the ethereal cosmic atmospheres of the instrumentals "All Out Of Time, All Into Space" and "Firdous E Bareen", sheltering in between the intriguing and disturbing "Holy Tears".

And finally the anxious "Garden of Light", an intricate construction in which again Harris' hyperactive percussion guides with great fluidity all the melody, and Gallagher's guitar riffs and Turner's raspy voice tension the development to the maximum leading it to an overflowing instrumental climax and its progressive dilution in an atmosphere of deep affliction until its conclusion.

"In the Absence of Truth" is a very good album, which on its release was critically acclaimed and commercially lived up to the achievements of Isis' previous works.

3.5/4 estrellas

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