My Review: Ist Ist - Light A Bigger Fire

 Ist ist - Light a bigger fire

"What I want exists, if only I have the courage to look for it"

Jeannette Winterson, writer, Manchester, UK

There are lost souls who resemble mushroom seekers, in woods covered by fog and pouring rain, intent on forming their identity, with courage in alert.

To the fourth work, the Mancunian band shows off bright sounds, new perspectives and an immense Gothic pop charge, free to satisfy a growth that has made itself evident in the many live lives in recent years. An idea, a concept, a reasoned din, an emphasis controlled by frenzy, glued to diamonds that breaking reveal powerful rays of light.

Vibrations as hidden spectra grafts that with surgical action sculpt the concept of sound. Although the trend is to put the climate in the fridge congenial to melancholy, the dark antimatter is perceptible, with evident umbratical sequences that will be recognized and loved by fans of the first hour.

The sound sources are heterogeneous and carved with continuity and intelligence, specifically, from the bottom, by guitars and battery, with the synthetic sounds that create create liquescent vortexes, modern in the form but with an ancient perfume, with the bow to The Human League and the Tubeway Army.

What impresses, astounds and conquers is the production entrusted to Joseph Croys, the soldier of the structure, who has worked with Hurts, Courteneeers and the Slow Readers Club. It is clear that the tools were given a guideline, a balance, in order to be able  to give more homogeneity to compositions already able to conquer the heart alone, but which needed a discipline and a sense of community that was missing in previous works.

The desire to conduct the songs in a mixed zone, where the purity of the musical genre is to be put aside: the harmonious union of forces has generated growth in writing, dynamics and in the ability to give a sense of freshness and positivity that perhaps had not been desired before. Adam Houghton's pen shines, like his new tendency to modify the interpretation of singing, without losing the unmistakable matrix that has characterized him for ten years.

But ...

But it is a shock to see a series of dialogues with the inner ego that become a song in the clouds full of sand, while the music deposits bark of shadows.

And it is epic that swells the veins, expands them, terrifies them, cursed them with grace and brings them in the streets of an ever closer Manchester for these four musicians with the streets of the mind travelled by a compact idea of ​​mutation, expanding their own energy and powerful motivations.

The freshness of the sounds is an intelligent deception: nothing really joyful lives in the effervescent melodies present in different episodes, and the song that closes the album will be an infinite meteor, without death, which will make it clear how much progression and flexibility exists in those fingertips always able to add mass to their magnet.

 Ist Ist are capable of perceiving the emotion donated, with an increasing number of people who use their compositions to compact loneliness, the traits of an evident uniqueness, despite, especially at the beginning, comparisons have not been lacking, generating an understandable one tedium in them.

The guitars and the bass, thanks to the extraordinary production, are less conspicuous but seem to work double, define the impetus through multiple abilities, ending up wearing the sound cloak with great precision and granting space to electronics to make everything contemporary And sensible. Son of a reality that denies a certain type of belonging to the discomfort, the disc instead captures what lives in the submerged and, through a fluid spider web of perceptions, becomes a metronome that puts the smudges in line, killing them to raise the meaning.

Songs as a tribute to the need for a blanket that ensures the safety of the soul: that's why everything flows, but a dark, a boulder, an avalanche, a landslide and an earthquake find a way to give us a sense of abundance that electrify the nerves and there colours of gray.

The perimeter of a laboratory open to intimacy, to the probe and combustion that can deprive themselves of the wild wave of the beginning have made their dream and their needs: everything is heavier, but with refinement, with the pain that seems to dress a Complete with lights ...

We cry for the vastness of meetings, experience with the evil seen on the one hand atypical, you dance with your head full of continuous hums, it is trembled for the feeling that a farewell is always possible with our existences, toast to talent of a work that summarizes, contains, diversifies and appears in its acid magnificence, disturbing and almost merciless. When they decide to grab life, they paralyze it with obese forms of endless explosions.

Dramatic, leaden, honest, concentrates the path of growth until you reach a recording studio where there is no miracle to wait for musicians but a job, head, belly, with lights that visit shadows to create a pact .

He supports the memory, watering the rhythm with a powerful balance of the drives, he cleans the melody to give a voice to the stammering that often damage the compositions. The four do not fall into the trap and paint the sky of each of our room with the line of an evident future:  Ist Ist are a resource, not a building to look at.

Let's put on the attention, we go to pulled this energy canvas and let us dance ...

Song by Song

1 - Lost My Shadows

Impetuous, overwhelming, in its dress of order, reaffirming the style, shape and attitude of the last two albums, the song that opens this is a link that however leaves small traces of what will happen. Simple but thunderous, it transmits, through Adam's words, the security that many of the past are now behind them, and the fourth long distance work proves it for real.

2 - The Kiss

Vibrations, pins and then the usual devastating bass of Andy open the gates, Mat’s synth draws trajectories close to Gary Numan and the refrain is a rainbow that travels inside the post-punk riffs of ordinance. But freshness makes everything different and attractive.

3 - Repetcussions

Here are, evident, the changes, the different skills, the new calibrated alternation games, in the sounds, in the movements, to begin an extraordinary will to acclimatize with the epic. When, in the second verse, Andy changes the effect of its instrument, it becomes evident that there is a calibration that gives the role of the song form a specificity never used previously. And the final phrasing of the guitars ends up being a sumptuous ride with the voice that returns to use the anger of the past ...

4 - I Can’t Wait for You

If the beginning offers us infinite references, from the Stranglers, to Interpol and to a long river that could also bore, the band structures a sweetness by thinning the smells, colours, not using the roar but the delicacy. And Joel's counterpoint, the drummer, enters like a vortex of hail in the head ...

5 - Dreams aren’t enough

How many sadnesses dance in tears waiting to be dried by a cruel destiny that visits the dreamlike aspect of existence. The voice goes down to the cellar, to climb the sky transported by a keyboard surrounding and makes it possible to approach, in an almost imperceptible crossover, at least three decades, to find us shredded by a hissing guitar, desperate ...

6 - Something Else

Joseph Croys investigates, perceives that it is not the mistakes that prevent growth, but a microscope in ideas must be put. In doing so, it is clear how much his hand created the possibility that a brilliant idea would become a roaring scream with the reins ... dark and full of yelps, with the words of Adam, the work of a caustic noise, the song manages to make dismayed , with the inevitable desire to sing and dance alone, barking to the moon. The breaks, the returns, become the fragorio that educates the heart ...

7 - What i know

The second song on side B is a short circuit, in which slowness, rarefaction, come to support the text and voice, to find a march that, with its martial cadence and surrounded by the use of a fine but exhaustive electronics, They produce a great sense of joy: some awareness make the songs eternal ...

8 - Hope to love you again

Imagine Robert Smith with the baritonal voice and his band in this feverish pop version: here is a simple, raw, hot ray of sun, with circular electronic circuits that transmit a fluid movement of movement ...

9 - XXX

Initial flashes of the Can and then a straight line, a thin propensity to mild beings but gravitating in infinity where there is no safety. And it is a whisk in slow motion, produces pain, suffocates and allows Adam to sing with the cables in the uvola, making us shiver. Everything speeds up, while the song remains slow, a miracle that turns out to be incomprehensible but seductive. In this structure far from the post-punk but more inclined to an experimentation close to New Age we are shown a band that can also get away from ourselves ...

10 - Ghost

A tragedy, a nail put under a press, a slow pain that galvanizes the merciless advance of a piece that breaks the heart, like a magnet that makes us know the void. The last song is a punch, an electric chair that chases us: first slowly, then less, returning to the final seconds to be a torch that illuminates our missing defenses.

Dramatic, in its performance, in its ability to wrap every soul in its network, starts from a piano which, by marrying a keyboard, calls the other tools to a relationship. But it is not the crescendo of the atmosphere that makes us feel that we have lost our legs, but the certainty that there is a restless mystery that governs the notes, the text, to make us feel like a patient with a few minutes to live. The melancholy approach is only one more electrode to make this composition the perfect way to illuminate the long trail of tears that can finally celebrate the new place to live. It is not pop, it is not rock, it is poetry that opens awareness and makes us fragile, in the best way, allowing us to give the four knights of Manchester our grateful embrace: thus concluding an album is the best possible murder ...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

20 September 2024

https://ististmusic.bandcamp.com/album/light-a-bigger-fire

Ist ist:

Adam Houghton

Joel Kay

Andy Keating

Mat Peters