The Iris

Shows in Review
By Carl Jenkins

WHEN: June 4th 2005
WHERE: Chasers, Phoenix, AZ

The Iris came up with a very interesting intro, the singer being on stage with just the sampler playing and him doing very soft, almost gothic vocals. Each member
slowly took the stage as the song continued, adding a new level to the sound each time, building into what was about to come. The sound of The Iris is something like a cross between Skinny Puppy and Fields of the Nephelem, Gothic with an Industrial undertone.

The Iris has a certain amount of comfort ability on stage that many bands don’t show all the time. The guitarist and singer had their own little two-man pit going on stage the whole time. The singer hit the ground twice, the last time with both of them landing on one of the monitors on the stage. With all the onstage violence and falling, it didn’t seem like either member ever missed a note. - SLAM Magazine

Industrial metal band The Iris has the formula down pat: fuzzy, sprawling guitars; creepy programming; singing that alternates between sick, low mumbling and screeching; and beats fit to bang your head or shake your booty to. And the band members -- singer Brandon Dooley, guitarists Kasey Kautenburger and Aeron Bailey, and drummer Tim Klever -- are all relatively good-looking, something they capitalized on by making a video for their first single, “Assfist,” shot in Los Angeles by director Kevin McVey. The video intersperses some bare-chested footage of the band with some weird hospital scenes that culminate in a doctor and a nurse having sex in the hospital morgue, and a patient leaping to his death from the top of the building. The band’s debut album, The Vanity Fair, brims with similar surreal doom, from stalker ballads like “Hush and Abide” to raging metal mashups like “Lucky Sevens,” all supported by song lyrics like “I want to fuck her upside down.” With frequent piano interludes and oft-whispered vocals, some of The Iris’ songs could almost be mistaken for love songs -- if typical love songs were about murderous sex, that is. - Phoenix New Times - Niki D'Andrea

The new CD by industrial metal band The Iris sounds like a sonic blueprint for a band that's finding its sound, and getting hotter by the minute. But the blueprint isn't new — Marilyn Manson, Deftones, and a dozen other bands drew it. What's great about The Vanity Fair is that it isn't wholly derivative, and it's highly ambitious. The songs show serious structure — some tunes start with creepy, tinkling piano introductions and then explode into ear-splitting screeching and power chords before sliding down into panicked, sweeping synths. Singer Brandon Dooley's got great range, moving easily from cracked whispers to deep-throated goth crooning to high-pitched screams. Problem is, he often sounds like he's gagging on his words, swallowing syllables before they're enunciated, so sometimes it's hard to understand what he's singing. It doesn't really matter when you've got a song like "Assfist," which is a nice piece of structured hard noise, engorged with synths and shrieks. But when the lyrics are listenable, Dooley sings stuff like "I'd like to fuck her upside down" ("Mirror, Mirror") and "Spit dick all over bitch spit" ("Hush and Abide"). Good stuff.

- Phoenix New Times - Niki D'Andrea