Ist Ist continued their launch week activities for their fourth studio album Light A Bigger Fire with an intimate out-store show in conjunction with Wax And Beans at Bury Met. Performing the album in full and in order they bring the record to glorious technicolour light and dispose finally of some of the comparisons they've had hung around their necks.
"Try and tell us we sound like Joy Division after this one. If anyone wants to come up to the merch desk and tell us we sound like Joy Division, I implore you to do so...." Andy jokingly tells the several hundred who've braved the Sunday night rain for this short-notice album launch show as they prepare to play the big bright multi-coloured Hope You Love Again eight songs into the forty minute set.
Light A Bigger Fire is the sound of Ist Ist opening up their darkness and revealing previously only hinted at light in glorious technicolour. Huge synth hooks are fused seamlessly in with their trademark rhythm section to create an album that fuses it all together in a majestic record that would feel as equally at home on daytime radio and the big halls they've started to frequent across Europe as it would in small intimate spaces like this.
The record is played in order and the sound in The Met is as impeccable as ever allowing all the subtleties to be heard loud and clear. The power in the singles that make up most of the first half of the album - Lost My Shadow, The Kiss, Repercussions, Dreams Aren't Enough - feels even more potent live whilst the more subtle moments - XXX's shimmering menace with a guitarless Adam prowling the stage and the resplendent epic Ghost even more so as it builds and builds to its crescendo like the soundtrack to an arthouse movie's final scene.
Hope To Love Again, with its killer opening line "you were told explicity to keep the fuck away from me" is every bit the majestic widescreen song that grounds that old comparisons face first into the dirt, whilst What I Know also signposts a movement towards something brighter and more accessible without compromising on their core principles.
Light A Bigger Fire looks set to give them their highest chart position yet on Friday, entering the hallowed Top 40, but it lays down a marker for the future sound of the band that goes beyond the greater commercial success that's beckoning them here and in Europe where they're headlining and well on their way to selling out the legendary Paradiso's main room in Amsterdam as part of the upcoming tour. The fire may well prove to be unextinguishable.
Light A Bigger Fire and previous records can be ordered via their website.
Digital versions of their previous limited edition releases and a number of live field recordings are available to download from their Bandcamp.
Ist Ist play Hebden Bridge Trades Club (October 2), Leeds Brudenell Social Club (3), Glasgow Slay (4), Newcastle Think Tank (5), Wolverhampton Newhampton Arts Centre (9), Bristol Exchange (10), Brighton Komedia (11), Sheffield Yellow Arch (12), Cambridge Mash (16), Nottingham Rescue Rooms (17), London Oslo (18), Manchester New Century (19), Whitby Tomorrow's Ghosts Festival (November 1), Groningen De Oosterpoort (4), Cologne Luxor (5), Frankfurt Zoom Club (6), Munich Live / Evil (7), Zurich Exil (10), Vienna Chelsea (11), Prague Club Varsava (13), Budapest Durer Kert (14), Warsaw Hybrydy (15), Bielefeld Movie (16), Amsterdam Paradiso Grote Zaal (18), Antwerp Kavka Zappa (19), Paris Le Mazette (20), Hamburg Kent Club (26) and Copenhagen Rust (27).
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