Isis, Torche – Scala, London, 04/12/08

15 December 2008, 09:15 | Written by Sean Bamberger

(Live)

Experimental Rock. Progressive Metal. Post Metal. Stoner Metal. Sludge Metal. Genres created by the music elitists to give stature and grace to what are essentially 6 minute trials of viciously repetitive guitar/genital stroking. Hmm, lets get a stereotypical introduction list going here. Right…Ominous and/or Ridiculous name? Cult Of Luna, Godflesh, Neurosis, Tortoise….check! A band member employed purely to add noise and mass to music, via extra guitar or tacky synthesizers? Check! Vocalist? Don’t be silly! If you need a singer, one of your guitarists can probably hold a note for a few seconds, so he can go ahead and thrash his throat out in the name of musical diversity. It’s these elements that mean aforementioned genres of music are unsurprisingly hard to penetrate and enjoy if you have even a smidgen of pop preference in your musical palette. I’ve listened to many a song created in this vein, and found them to be alienating and dull. With this in mind, I arrived at the Scala to watch two very well respected bands play the very kind of music that I find near impossible to fully appreciate.Due to the world’s longest guestlist queue (there are a LOT of fans in the industry it seems), I struggle through a few layers of large jeans and pentagram hoodies to witness half of Torche‘s set. As I’m informed, Torche have just been reduced to a three piece due to the departure of one member. I was therefore expecting a weak, frail stab at something maybe slightly post-rock. Thankfully Torche still have plenty of balls as a three piece, and their lack of shredder meant that they were instead twice as dirgy and grimy. Slow grooves from the bass of a clearly entranced Jonathan Nuñez criss-crossed with the chugging rhythms from under the cliche black cowboy hat of Steve Brooks. Add to that the energy and passion exhibited by drummer Rick Smith (the man couldn’t stay on his stool for longer than 10 seconds before nearly jumping at his kit just to hit a cymbal or two), and Torche quickly achieved the standard appreciative stoner head-nodding action going all the way to the back of the venue. High praise indeed. Granted, each song end was greeted with cheers and claps, but at large the audience was just a rippling mass of pale heads on black clothing. The sound was marred slightly by a quiet guitar, but this just lent more force to the rhythm section. Torche are clearly an excellent band, but at times their songs failed to hold the attention of the crowd, although that was to their credit a rare event, and was always quickly remedied by a heavy drop or grimy breakdown.

After the appearance of a security guard who spent a good 10 minutes insulting the crowd, much to his (and strangely their) amusement, headliners Isis hit the stage to a frankly mediocre greeting from the crowd. I was initially confused at such a tepid reaction, because Isis are deserving of the praise levelled at them for being trailblazers in their field, no matter how impenetrable said field may be. After an introduction which made me realise that bands like Oceansize and Mogwai are maybe not as original as some muso’s make them out to be, the band crashed headlong into ‘So Did We’, an off-kilter (I’m thinking it was in 6/4, but I’m sure I’ll get my arse hauled up infront of the music world if I say that for definite and turn out to be wrong) groove that flowed slowly into a crushing beatdown, and then a second after that was even heavier. This band are capable of making a serious wall of noise when required. ‘Grinning Mouths’ got a large cheer from the audience, with whirling guitars inciting mass movement from the crowd, in a variety of different ways. It was at this point that my focus from the band began to waver from the music to the individual reactions exhibited from people watching. It seems that watching Isis, or indeed any band of this genre, is an intensely personal experience. I counted Head Nodders, Conductors waving arms, Moshers piling into Nodders, Air Guitarists holding their own with their imagined technical abilities, and an endearingly honest man in a businessman’s suit rocking out like a botched cross between a 90′s acid raver and MC Hammer. It was a sight to behold, and in all honesty distracted me from at least half of an Isis song.

I guess that’s the main problem with this style of music – the grim reality seems to be that if you don’t get it, you just don’t get it. As Isis piled through ‘Holy Tears’ and ‘The Beginning and The End’, I could appreciate the power and technical excellence, but I couldn’t fully fall in love with the band because this style of music just doesn’t click with me. Obviously this is personal preference, and from a reviewer perspective I would be a dick if I marked a well-loved and incredibly well received band down because of my own musical ideals. Both Isis and Torche played better than 90% of bands out there in the music world, to a sold out crowd who were all passionate fans, no half-convinced stragglers or sneering industry ponces. Well, aside from me that is. By the time the set ended, and the two track encore of ‘Hive Destruction’ and ‘Carry’ stole the crowds eyes from train timetables and back stage wards, I was sat upstairs in a booth, unashamedly exhibiting my ambivalence. It was an A-class gig, but in the end it comes down to one thing; this kind of music is just not for me. Even two heavyweights such as Torche and Isis can play their hearts out and still not change my mind.