Islet – Illuminated People
Shape Records
Cardiff’s Islet managed to entice speculation and even adulation when they first broke a couple of years back simply by refusing to play the game — no Twitter, no Facebook, no website. The only way you could catch a glimpse of the band online was via shaky handheld footage of their cacophonous live shows or through a very basic fan-run page. Good work — it certainly got them noticed.
Islet were also noted for being, here we go, ‘indescribable’. In 2012 we have what could be considered their fourth release proper (does ‘This Fortune’, a live collage, count?), and not only do they now have a platform on all the usual social networking and band-pimping sites, but they are very much ‘describable’ if, as this record suggests, remarkably unusual, possibly unique.
Illuminated People is a controlled explosion of an album. Genuinely wild, sometimes maddeningly obtuse ideas are somehow melded to create something that can alternately bore and enthrall — often within the same song.
Take opener ‘Libra Man’: it jerks into life with judders of electronic keys, cold and abrasive, before harmonic vocals soothe and usher in a series of screams, then tribal beats. Suddenly we’re in full-throttle psych territory; all 13th Floor Elevators honking, mod revival vocals and a wildly unappealing forced baritone chorus. That the song’s second half (yes, it’s a nine-minute opener) alternates between droning prog and brain-melting math beats should be no surprise. It’s an album built around unpredictable changes in direction and good-humoured rather than indulgent repetition.
Standout track ‘What We Done Wrong’ suggests a folky, choral devotional before devolving into pub-punk, passing through a little of Tangerine Dream’s kosmische scenery before landing on full-pelt Explosions In The Sky post-rock. Elsewhere we’ve got tremendous, teary-eyed acoustic indie in ‘We Bow’, the superb psychedelic hardcore (yes, it’s possible) of ‘Filia’, the sadly undercooked calypso pop/jagged dance of ‘Funicular’ and the pointless ‘Shores’ with its droning circus-song instrumentation. Closer ‘A Bear On His Own’ is just marvellous, however, touching on everything from Gorky’s sweetness to ’70s power pop, before ascending a strangely curved ladder of electro and spitting out the end of the album with a couple of old school, alt-metal breakdowns. Just in case you thought they were somehow lacking in diversity, you know?
As available as these madcap sorts have gradually made themselves to the world of web, they’ve lost nothing of their intention to create willfully strange, often difficult but queerly brilliant music. Michael James Hall
