Ist Ist - The Art of Lying

 

IST IST

My Review

Ist Ist - The Art of Lying

There are clouds that descend to widen our fears and tensions, to make us look inside ourselves and seek contact with the unconscious. The will to understand the present, the surrounding, to take a stand has many methods.

The second album by Mancunians Ist Ist is one of them.

After the debut of Architecture (album of the year 2020 for Musicshockworld) here they are advancing into ever more visible qualities that are available to everyone. It’s a grey and sparkling poetry the one that you can read inside these grooves, in a cobalt blue vinyl which expands its power on the walls willing to be stunned. And it happens.

You can breathe in their maturity: this second work makes clear the perception we had with their debut album. They know how to write intense and devastating songs. Now they do it even better. 

The mood is one of a tiring, stinging moment: COVID has left behind not just fear, but the need to limit the range of visibility of this devastating pandemic in order to come to terms with one’s own personal space, in an exhausting restriction.

And to do this, Adam (vocals and guitar) has thickened his lyrics with awareness; his words are hammered, cacophonous expressions that bring new truths from the absence of oxygen. Lyrics that stick to the music without fear or stammers.

The guitars return to be obsessive and present as in their devastating beginnings, with keyboards that permeate the whole in a perfect way, timings that make understand their growth also in the arrangements and in the structure of the compositions.

What you can breathe inside these 10 songs is also a sense of positive frustration, energetic with the will not to save their energy.

Songs like asbestos dust that gets into our ears to contaminate every possible defence.

Impossible to oppose.

Everything travels through notes that, like swords from the 16th century, corrode and become lethal: songs like cuts on our wounds, like skin that tears and explodes.

Their presence continues to be heavy, dark, dramatic and cathartic, but they have added pills of wisdom and given Postpunk the chance to look back only long enough to pick up the pearls. But as architects they are interested in inventing new ways, increasing the possibility of a unique and recognisable style. Certainly there will be people who will spend more time finding support and security in making comparisons, instead of noticing everything new that shows its presence. 

Their second album may be a  demanding listening if one is not prone to multiple emotions and to accept a quick enrichment of the soul.

If lying is an art, this album reveals the sincerity of artists who oppose this modus operandi. There is honesty, spontaneity, integrity and richness of soul in these minutes that will be able to give us, although in a corrosive atmosphere, moments of relief...

Listening Through the Walls

"Private whispers in the wall”

Playing cards on the table. A clear and precise game: the four open the dark dances as a slow, electronic rock, a Coldwave that seems to come from its homeland, Belgium, with slow steps and soft, oblique metal sheets above our heads. Rattles and bells cut through the air until a guitar at the end adds melancholy.

Fat Cats Drown in Milk

"Reality has the sharper blade"

A walking bomb, continuing to explode. 

Drumming like a mountain that descends and drags.

A bass that sinks like a liturgical Postpunk ritual.

Keyboards in support that give us the slightest chance to dream and a voice, with its singing, which paralyses us among wet and crass currents.

A superlative act of extreme beauty. Involving, a mantra to be carved in the sky.

Middle Distance

"My thoughts had rearranged”

Andy and his scratchy bass, Adam and his vitriolic voice that penetrates the earth, Mat who delicately puts his fingers on his keyboards and Joel who simply knocks us down with his drumming. 

A track that reveals how Architecture was the base and not an end point. And finally Andy makes us dance sensually with powerful bass lines.

Watching You Watching Me

"My doubt of you still screaming through my head”

We’re back to swirling rhythms with this raid exploring other people's possessions.

It's a postpunk shower with a generous attitude. 

Keyboards open the heart, then bass, guitar and vocals arrive for a verse that leaves us stand open-mouthed with joy. The chorus gives way. It's radioactivity that spreads on the skin and enters our inner circuits.

Because melody and strength find an agreement, a belligerent pact.

After the refrain, the lava arrives with a bastard and earthy bass. Keyboards take our heart and our black eyes from dreamy become awake and dark.

The Waves

"The tide washes over me"

Violence blunted on the elbows, cavernous darkness which is stiff and dirty on the sides, a legless run for the whole period of the introduction and then off, while the breath runs with us in the Manchester of 1980 looking towards that of 2021. Overwhelming, like an evil witch, as sweet as the liquids prepared by the druids, this song is the summa of their present, between hisses and silver melodies. Guitars that from The Fall pass through the veins of Killing Joke, in a fast and murderous flow, leaving the music all the time it needs to make us fall into its web.

Extreme Greed

"Spotted plants, shelved dreams"

A track that inherits all the beauty of Architecture: it presents the memory of it but then dives down into the Irwell, our historical river, to feed on future and keyboards that, starting from Synthwave and Coldwave, navigate until joining the near future. A bass like a magnet, vocals like a foal, everything runs with lead at the ankles.

It Stops Where it Starts

"My words fall on deaf ears"

Fierce shivers, running, shaking inside our hungry desire to escape. A paralysing track, a psychotic whip without residence, angry and vital. Andy like Simon Gallup of the eighties, a drumming that has welcomed the Darkwave to make it germinate, Mat that catalyzes the air with his keyboards. A bone-crunching hound. Praise be to the best Postpunk.

If It Tastes Like Wine 

"I'm here in body not in spirit"

Take the raw atmosphere of their EP Everything is Different Now, infect it with caustic rage and dip it in a glass of wine.

You’ll have slimy frustrations and relentless wounds.

Skin-eating lava.

Then a sip of wine and a lopsided Felt-esque guitar to stun us and make us fertile: it's a song that makes us travel from England to America and through miles of wine in between ready to intoxicate us. 

Heads on Spikes

"We've got lumps in our throats"

Sweetness is unknown, isn't it? You wouldn't expect it from them. All this in Mat's short introduction. Then Adam and his vocals, his voice like suffocating gas anticipates what the other two will add shortly. 

And it's a catastrophe, the clouds lower until they touch the earth. We dream weeping, with the guitar that with the raw simplicity of a solo wears us out.

Don't Go Gentle

"The river was rain”

The wisdom of these guys lies in the awareness of not being able to give us certainties. And they end the record with a song that is electronic water vapour, the unpredictable that shows its grey cloak, the Manchester that doesn't die and that lives with effort. A track that disorients and seduces, enchants, sums up their talent and ends the listening of this album with a smile that looks towards the crater they have managed to dig inside us. Like the other nine compositions, this one will put you in touch with beauty, because true Art cannot lie...

Alex Dematteis 

Musicshockworld 

Salford

25th November 2021