IST IST’s DAGGER arrives wrapped in this dusk, buckled in post-punk leather, performing the ritual gestures of menace with the commitment of a theatre student who loves Joy Division. The guitars are correct. The atmosphere is correctly atmospheric. And yet, something is wrong in the centre of the thing, like a tooth that looks fine until you press it. For me, the tooth is the vocals.
Adam Houghton’s voice wants to be a dark corridor, locked, with light seeping underneath. What it comes off as, instead, is a man doing an impression slightly too grand, slightly too aware of the grandeur, the baritone deployed with the careful deliberateness of someone who has practiced the baritone in a mirror. The delivery arrives pre-aged, pre-bruised, emotional weight stencilled on rather than worn in. You are being told that something is haunting. The haunting is announced, genuinely, haunted things do not make announcements.
The guitars build rooms you would genuinely like to stand in — cold rooms, rooms where the furniture has been moved and not moved back. The production has restraint, which is rare and should be noted. If you removed the voice and replaced it with, say, the sound a building makes when no one is inside it, you would have a very good instrumental record. But the voice is not removed. It intones. It descends.
This is completely a matter of opinion, but the best post-punk of today is trying to do something singular, rather than give homage to the post-punk greats. I discovered IST IST through ACTORS. The difference is ACTORS is a band that, while leaning into the goth post-punk vibe, has found something that separates them from the old ’80s post-punk of yore. IST IST has not, not with DAGGER.
