PANOPTICON

The Panopticon, the circular penitentiary that would allow the most efficient control of the prison population devised by the preeminent English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, serves as the location for the fictionalised and harsh story that Isis develops for their eponymous album "Panopticon" (2004), the third in the band's discography.

The conceptual work that narrates the miseries of prison in very brief and sobering stanzas, unfolds in hypnotic atmospheres dominated by a permanent sensation of heavy wakefulness, interrupted in different passages by unbridled and oversaturated instrumental discharges. From Aaron Turner's guttural howls and his ultra-distorted guitar riffs shared with Mike Gallagher in the introductory and suffocating "So Did We" and in the portentous "Backlit", the songs flow without haste or pressure, under the thick wall of sound that Jeff Caxide's deep bass and Aaron Harris' persistent and raw percussion interweave, as in the desolate "In Fiction" and its continuation in the oscillating "Wills Disolve" and the devastatingly soaring and anguished "Syndic Calls" (one of the album's best tracks), interwoven together by Bryant Cliff Meyer's spatial layers of synthesizers.

The inverse path of "Syndic Calls" is followed by the gentle and instrumental "Altered Course", backed by bassist Justin Chancellor (Tool), starting energetically and then fading into an agonising and tiring harmony, and the disturbing mid-tempo "Grinning Mouths", another great track, resumes the hostile and dark character of the album, concluding the work with an overflowing instrumentation that abruptly reaches its end point.

"Panopticon" is a very good album and an inescapable reference of post rock, one of the most frontier ramifications of progressive rock, and probably one of the highest points in the musical career of the Bostonians.

Very good

4 stars

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