Last week, we posted a lengthy, comprehensive interview with Isis frontman Aaron Turner about the band's new album Wavering Radiant, which comes out May 5. Turner also discussed the band's development, the power of trance-metal and the state of the music industry. Click "more" to hear the podcast, listen the Wavering Radiant track "20 Minutes/40 Years" and find out what else you might have missed if you weren't glued to HeadbangersBlog.com all last week. Check out our  Twitter site regularly to stay on top of every new post. Read more...

Like Tool, Neurosis and Pelican, Boston-bred post-metal band Isis creates sprawling, droning metal that's both brutal in impact and transcendent in delivery. Whether performed with screamed or softly sung vocals, dense or spacious guitars, storming beats or featherlight cymbal strokes, the songs spiral, twist and dive in both narrative and instrumental story arcs, unraveling like epic poems or multi-layered film soundtracks.

Isis songs aren't constructed with traditional verses or choruses and they're not willfully oblique, instead blossoming like computer fractals into something beautiful and mysterious. Only, they're not randomly generated -- not at all. Each swelling crescendo, every billowing cluster of tones is carefully examined, analyzed and assembled to be as emotional and revelatory as possible. Sometimes they tumble in jagged, rhythmically complex shards, other times they drift in sparse, simple waves, yet however they reveal themselves, they do so with purpose and passion. (Click "more" to hear our podcast interview with Isis frontman Aaron Turner.) Read more...

photo by Maia Larsen

We all knew Enslaved guitarist Ivar Bjørnson had a blackened soul and an icy heart, so it's no surprise that the dude's iPod is filled with the Norwegian metal of Darkthrone, Mayhem, Dødheimsgard and Ulver. There's also plenty of progressive, experimental stuff like Shining, Isis and Tool, which makes sense considering how psychedelic and jazzy Enslaved's last album Vertebrae was. However, we were a little bit surprised by the inclusion of Rolling Stone's radio hit "Brown Sugar," and Elvis Presley's "Return to Sender." We guess everybody needs some classic rock in their lives from time to time. Conclusion: Either this guy totally walks the walk and talks to talk, or he's lying through his teeth and trying to make us think he does. For black metal fans, we give Bjørnson's list a 90 for listenability. For mainstream metal fans, it's more like a 50. And to those people, Bjørnson would say in Norwegian, "F--k off and die you f--king posers!" Click "more" to read Bjørnson full iPod Random Shuffle list and watch an extreme metal video. Read more...

MTV2 will be teaming up with Revolver magazine to present the premiere hard rock and heavy metal awards show, the first annual Epiphone Revolver Golden Gods Awards, which will storm through Los Angeles' Club Nokia on Tuesday, April 7. The event will feature Ozzy Osbourne, Killswitch Engage, Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan and more, and will be aired on MTV2 as a one-hour special on Saturday, May 2.

"We're working really hard to make this an event worthy of the music it celebrates," Revolver editor in chief Tom Beaujour tells HeadbangersBlog.com. "Metal deserves this and deserves to have it done f---ing right." Read more...

Yeah, we know Unearth's new album, The March, is coming out October 14 and it's a pretty strong record, but right now we're far more stoked about the new Earthless double disc, Live at Roadburn, an offering that definitively conveys the breathtaking spontaneity and headspinning grandeur of this San Diego droner-metal band.

A stuporgroup composed of guitarist Isaiah Mitchell (Nebula, Drunk Horse), bassist Mike Eginton (Electric Nazarene) and drummer Mario Rubalcaba (ex-Rocket From the Crypt, Hot Snakes, Blackheart Procession), Earthless play transcendent, apocalyptic, riff-rock that flows, bubbles and burns like rivers of magma through dense forestland. Touch points are Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath, Tab-era Monster Magnet, Sleep, Loop, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, and unlike many stoner bands, Earthless draw from each of their influences in a way that's easily identifiable, but never derivative.

Chaos and chance are two of their main motivations, which explains the birth of Live at Roadburn. The sonic expedition wasn't meant to be an album, let alone a four-song double disc that seems to last as long, and is nearly as vibrant as a colorful acid trip. Here's what happened. Earthless were invited to play the 200-capacity club the Batcave at the 2008 Roadburn Festival in Tilburg, Holland, but right before they were scheduled to go on, they were asked by festival organizers if they would play the main stage instead. As it turned out, headliners, Isis, had only used part of their two-hour long time slot and fans were clamoring for more. So, Earthless moved themselves and their equipment, then blissed out for 90 minutes before 2,000 awestruck music fans. When they found out that the show had been taped, they listened back to the recordings and decided that the gig captured their improvisational spirit and raw urgency better than any studio recording, they decided to release the entire spellbinding concert.

Click "more" to ingest some of the magic. Read more...

The correct answer to yesterday's Indecipherable Logo of the Day is:

f) Lesbian

Why would four dudes from Seattle call themselves Lesbian? "Because its name evokes pure, sexually charged freedom -- and that's what rock is all about." That comes from the band's own press release, not us, so you know it's got to be true.

The group's debut album, Power Hor, is an amalgam of various incendiary styles, including psychedelic, doom, thrash, black, progressive and classic metal, and the four lengthy songs on the disc stomp and lumber like a brontosaurus leveling a lesbian gym.

"Fans of bands like Neurosis, Emperor, Skullflower, Boris, Pelican, Sleep and Isis now have a band that amazingly sounds like a hybrid of all of those legendary groups." Again, that's the publicist's words, not ours. We simply cannot find words to describe this synapse-frazzling, genre-defying thunderstorm of broken glass, bile and beer.

Stream the whole record here and judge for yourself.

Obviously, Isis aren't your average heavy metal band. Their music is as soft as it is loud, they don't conform to any standards in length or arrangement and their songs are both ominous and spiritually uplifting.

Eradicating rules, eliminating edicts and exploring possibilities is their raison detre, and it permits them to do anything and go anywhere within the realm of sound. On the front cover of their new album, In the Absence of Truth, there's a sentence in quotes: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." Last night in New York City's Irving Plaza, they lived up to this edict with a set that invented as it droned, and repaired while it ripped.

Most amazingly, Isis accomplish their freeform adventurism without seeming pretentious, turning every rhythmic swell, distortion wave, keyboard flutter and drum crash into a sonic ocean that teems with danger and beauty, elation and depression.

Sure, we're stating to sound kind of out there, but this music brings that out in you. Like Tool, Rush and Pink Floyd, and to a lesser extent Kraut rock maestros such as Faust and Neu!, Isis aren't about the fist and the sky, it's music for the mind and the body, and each pulsing wave makes a powerful connection within that inspires as it enervates.

After an interminable delay by the U.S. State Department, Jesu were finally allowed into the country and, at their debut performance here, demonstrated why their fans have been storming the walls of the White House — well, not really — to see them. Fronted by ex-Godflesh mastermind Justin Broadrick, the group plays bleak, repetitive and strangely melodic music that pulses like the heart of a hospital patient under heavy sedation.
Live, the band sounds louder and more aggressive than it does on its two albums, and while there are vestiges of that old Godflesh bite and harmonic screech, there are no signs of the kind of aneurysm-inducing rage that drove Broadrick's former band. Instead, the songs are propelled by tribal beats, walls of textural guitar static and weary vocal melodies that take drone metal to a new, exciting and inevitably depressing zone.

The bottom line: If you're feeling low, this stuff will either gently shake you out of your funk or make you weep at the hopelessness of it all.