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

My Review: St. Jimi Sebastian Cricket Club - Into Your Heartbeat

 St. Jimi Sebastian Cricket Club - Into Your Heartbeat

A storm, when it can be gentle, accommodating, peaceful, seems not credible and is defined in other ways. It happens the same in music, more rarely, because it is considered an event that at least attracts attention.

The Swedish band, of which the Old Scribe had told you about a single in April, returns to specify the incredible trails, moral, physical, attitudinal, of a work that leads to an intimate propensity for recollection, a cultural recreation, for a series of archaeological reunions that live between these grooves, in an oscillation between sweetness, melancholy, research, taste in subtle social criticism, in stories that show the range of a writing capable of visiting reality. 

The range of style and musical genres present is clear, but how much ability to make it all seem like an evening among friends amidst tears, bottles, laughter, tears and many questions is perhaps less so, for those who do not descend into the perfumed clods of their class.

The heartbeat in the title of this gem is nothing other than life presenting itself, with its limpid willingness to be present at an undeniable possibility.

Thus we have compositions that build a hemisphere, with the elegance of a score skilful in crossing an ancient sense and spirit with modernity, on a constant pilgrimage in the moderation of tones and words. There is no shouting, no insults, and even less accusations: the band is polite, patient, working hard to come to grips with the acute desire to make a record that teaches one to document oneself, to absent oneself from judgement.

The references and proximities to a long line of bands active especially in the 1990s are numerous, but one always has the pleasant feeling that St. Jimi Sebastian Cricket Club comes from that very period, having had the foresight to hide.

There are uniquenesses, openings that the formations of those years did not have, a sacredness that reaches even to cabaret, theatre, cinema, with an incredible voracity on the meticulousness of the phrasing, on the succession of the arrangements, on the pulses as propulsors of an energy that must be incorporated into a project. Ten tracks like a walk in the natural park of existence, with faces and vicissitudes that find the oil of wisdom to make everything soft and functional.

Remarkable is the fact that, although listening allows one to take these walks easily within oneself, one gets the impression of small torments, some fatigue, the search for a perfection that it was possible to achieve through all this. Everything works, moves and arrives in the confines of a tension that knows how to find poetic trees among the avenues of a writing that, through indie rock, the elegant side of pop rock, the stantuffs of cabaret that swallows folk in laughter, frees the Stockholm band from the anxiety of having to search for perfect music.

To them belongs the ability of an artistic expressiveness that is pleasant to take on stages, in the rooms of those people who decide to hold under their arms, like an unknown parchment, these five Nordic minstrels, imbued with almost medieval traits in the moments in which they make everyone aware (through deep lyrics and music like compasses to bring them properly to the hearts) of what is happening.

Prairies, buildings, factories, roads, flights, birds, shadows, sounds, diamonds, gunshots, trains, alcoholic forays into joy as well as sadness, make this work a wonderful wallet full of emotional coins

A continuous departure, from unawareness on the melodic train to arrival at an enormous force, which allows these agglomerates of notes to become sharable experiences, generating petals of curiosity and intoxication. In alternating slow and fast paces, it is clear how impact, impetuosity and thoughtfulness are definitely present in their brilliant and capable minds, to push the music into imaginary fields, close to our planets, our stars, our confusion-filled days. With the same direct action of the Pogues in making this choice of life a highway, the alcohol they drink is a liquid full of seasoned ferments, with time consolidating the validity of the choices, of the sounds, of these stanzas so conscious that they allow the refrains to be a dutiful consequence, where writing in minor sometimes seems in major.  Voltages as dear to the Housemartins as to Belle & Sebastien, melodic intuitions close to Reading's Blueboys as to Birmingham's The Sea Urchins, and melancholic overtones very similar to Norway's Saybia, denote a remarkable, itinerant, lucid and well-equipped complexity. But over all wins a bridge that connects Sweden to England, made up of studies, explorations and the will to make emotional and mental fluidity the pretext for songs that can unite fantasies, tales and effervescent embassies like a shanghai (Mikado) in reverse, in which the one who falls and not the one who remains standing wins: another mammoth magic of this combo.... 

And an incredibly pleasant and heartbreaking fact is to feel wrapped in tears that seem to make us aware of everything around us.

Yes, without a doubt, this record must be known, used and transported everywhere, without hesitation...

Song by Song

1 - Stockholm Central Station

‘She's always been a rover, a panda scarred by the tides

 hooked on a glistening dream, with one foot in the truth

 if you do not like the silence, you know nothing at all’.

Freedom is a falling beam, when personal space is sought within a relationship. Here, what opens listening to this album reveals an excellent balance between recognising the value of the other and one's own needs. All this within an easygoing, light, sunny atmosphere, a low-hanging fruit from 1960s California with delightful choruses and countermelodies that connect perfectly between docile and more robust guitars.

2 - Soothing Nights

‘And our days, pass by like streams and waterfalls tranquil madness, and soothing nights

 but some hours, they last forever, carved in stone, with your smile’.

From my review published in April:

‘There is a poem that flies through the air, it has no ink traces on its skin but vibrant notes on its back, in a contortion that sucks up the sky gracing, surprisingly, the bright trail of a sleepless night. A song that in its poignant monotony reveals streams of beautiful committees of sadness, with the intention of exploring celestial space contemplating a dying star. It does not need to vary, except in the rhythm that increases, with the entry of the drums and an increasingly enveloping atmosphere, to combine the lyrics with a set of sound clusters that, like a liquid chasm, compact the universe of feelings.’

3 - Until We Meet Again

‘So hold me, forever I can still hear the sound

 the sound of laughter on a quiet night, I'll never

 until we meet on your side, let it go’

From Mexico to the States, then back to Sweden, an indie rock sting with the idea of hugging mariachis and then leaving it all behind in an energetic ride in which the lyrics tackle important, painful, troublesome themes with great maturity, where in the end a fall is stopped by an embrace, for a repeated beginning, again and again...

4 - When you tremble

‘You might be scared, you might lose control

 when you tremble, but from tonight you're not alone’.

Time as seen through a window leads to the intersection of sunshine and night, as do these notes that tackle fear with an effective melodic backbone, allowing the sweetness to play its part, with the vocal that aptly adopts an anger on a leash, and the chord distortions that, sifting through the alternative indie of the nineties, play with light and shadow, for a truly intense track...

5 - Lemonhead Cabaret

‘I'm standing in a hole, and have the longest road to walk’

Like the Smiths, the band is at ease between light, funky notes and dynamite lyrics. The result is a song that seems to come from Galway, on a free descent into English ballads, only to return to Sweden with a theatricality that makes the heavens open...

6 - Golden Parachuter

‘I can still hear the sound of my heartbeat and a drum

 in the smell of mint where my promises are dead’.

With the beginning that brings us home to Arcade Fire, everything fades out and moves away from Canada and into the Swedish sky, with effervescent melodies and songs, in order to save a soul and play with the dynamite, sensual bass and guitars that know how to use glam rock tricks in a context however free of exaggeration...

7 - Westbourne Terrace

‘There's a million regrets and something holding up the door for me

 there's a fly drifting away towards the crown of a maple tree’

Tears can fly as well as walk, and they manage to do so perfectly in this ballad that includes psychedelic pills, transporting us back to the 1970s, and in which the singing plays with the fierceness of the sound of the words, in a form that paralyses: a cloud covering the light serves all...

8 - Penguins of the Ghetto

‘I have something on my mind not yet a corpse, I'll come round it's a fine day, for a speech’

At the moment when alcohol delivers truth to dulled minds anything can happen: here is a rock foray with Irish petals by the bursting Sultans of Ping F.C. from the Veronica period.

 The vocal is given the central role in the verse.

 We then find canyon-like open guitars, stop and go drums, with a woman and her children as actors in the story of this man digging into his weakness...

9 - The 9.15 Train Departs at 9.15am

‘There's not much space on postcards so I better keep it brief

 and make sure to leave it clear’

The Swedish band's joyful irony is impressive: just this song is enough to see the feat of a multifaceted marriage with different eras and modes, while everything flows with ease...

10 - Sailor Girl

‘12 months and a prayer, I fought all the shadows and doubt

 never strayed from our doorstep, but we hold for another day’

The surprises continue at the last station: a melancholic folk fountain with vitaminic lashings of words that capture the power of a bad dream lead to an epic, stadium-like refrain that gives the single courage. And it is a joy coupled with sadness that slips into a nostalgic and truly incisive whistling to describe a harmonious leaning towards a very European storytelling, and then closes it all in a parting that makes us realise how the temporal space of this album is a fairy tale without an end...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

15th September 2024

https://open.spotify.com/album/2gfcDx5zj89C21EhC4EMa9?si=TwQCXficRXeJ3T4_6rsqTg