Pink Floyd founder Richard Wright, photo courtesy of www.telegraph.co.uk
A little over a week has passed since Pink Floyd founder Richard Wright died at age 65 following a bout with cancer. Obviously, Pink Floyd were hardly a metal band, but their impact on the heavy metal genre is impossible to deny. And it isn't just psychedelic and atmospheric acts like Neurosis, Opeth, Mastodon, Isis, Pelican and Nachtmystium that were influenced by Floyd. The intensity of songs like "One of These Days," "In The Flesh" and "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" and "Welcome to the Machine" was comparable to the tension and dynamics of metal. And the desperation, darkness, anguish and fatalism in the vocals and lyrics is as gloomy as that of any Sabbath-derived doom band.

And that's why a bunch of stoner, doom and experimental metal bands have gotten together to create Like Black Holes in the Sky: The Tribute to Syd Barrett. As the title explains, the album is actually a tribute to early Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett, whose madcap antics and excessive drug use and erratic behavior earned him an early dismissal from the band -- despite the fact that he wrote the majority of Floyd's stunning debut, 1967's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He was replaced by David Gilmour, who, over the next two decades, helped Pink Floyd reach creative and commercial heights few imagined possible. Barrett died of diabetes in July 2006 at age 60.

Click "more" to stream Like Black Holes in the Sky: The Tribute to Syd Barret, which features such acts as Kylesa, Jesu, Intronaut, Unearthly Trance, Giant Squid, Stinking Lizaveta, Pentagram and Yakuza. Read more...

photo by Jon Wiederhorn

Clearly, ex-Godflesh frontman Justin Broadrick isn't strictly an industrial metal artist anymore. But having spent more than 13 years as a mainstay of the genre, he's entitled to do whatever the hell he wants as long as it's cool. And his new, prolific band Jesu, which has released two albums and four EPs since 2004, is totally frickin' cool.

The group has been called ambient metal, and that's not a bad tag considering how the compositions on Jesu's latest EP Why Are We Not Perfect? are often brooding and nihilistic. But it would be equally justifiable to term the band newgazers, since the drifting, droning rhythms, celestial guitar effects and breathy, melancholy vocals have much in common with the ethereal sonic cathedrals constructed in the '90s by artists like Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, Chapterhouse, Drop Nineteens and Moose.

Better yet, don't bother calling it anything. Just open your mind and let the gauzy textures and radiant atmospheres tickle and numb your brain. Click "more" to listen to Why Are We Not Perfect? Read more...

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.