ischia

Fronted by vocalist/guitarist Adele Ischia (and absolutely nothing to do with the island in Italy), the band’s grasp of almost every avenue of pop-facing guitar music is their signature. Marbling grunge’ing alt-rock with sugary indie-pop; 80s-disco with dream-soaked shoegaze,  unifying the band’s upcoming debut album  Leave Me To The Future - due next week on 13th September via Siluh Records - is Adele’s own androgynous vocal, and her cutting sentiments on motherhood and masculinity.

Their line-up is made up of people who are usually on stage with other big names in the Viennese indie scene (Endless Wellness, Yukno, Sharktank, Cousines Like Shit...). However, ischia is not actually a side project, but the band around front woman and namesake Adele Ischia, which was formed from years of friendship and spontaneous association. Their debut album "Leave me to the Future" reveals the wide range of their sound, from krautrock grooves to post-shoegaze psychedelia, but at its core is always a melodious pop song.

Enough with one side/the other! "Sometimes you have to take sides", sings Adele Ischia in the opener of "Leave Me to the Future", the debut album by the band named after her surname - but with a lowercase "i"! - (nothing to do with the Italian volcanic island of the same name).
I guess that's what you call a statement. It doesn't hurt that "Sides" bursts in with a hypnotic, swirling guitar riff that could have come from the fingers of Kevin Shields (Ischia is clearly a My Bloody Valentine fan, not the easiest thing for a guitarist to do).
The song, she explains, speaks to the kind of men who "feel very quickly attacked when you confront them with their lack of reflection on their position, and immediately go into this defense-justification mode."
The quoted line about the need to choose sides is also ironic, as both Ischia and bassist Hjörtur Hjörleifsson have a dual career as members of the hugely successful Viennese band Endless Wellness.

But as it turns out, ischia, the band featuring Lena Kauntz on lead guitar and keyboards and Philipp Hackl on drums, doesn't just produce a completely different, veritably psychedelic post-shoegaze pop sound. Their roots actually go back much further. To the day when a 15-year-old Adele saw an 18-year-old Hjörtur playing on the street in her old hometown of Salzburg. "He was just this cool Icelandic musician with his suspenders and scarf," she says, "It's not so hard to stand out in Salzburg." Ischia herself is said to have looked like a young Bob Dylan. And no, she doesn't sound like one, but a certain androgyny can hardly be denied in her dark voice.

The two never completely lost sight of each other, even though Hjörtur played in bands as different as Chilli & The Whalekillers and Oehl in the meantime. But it was the encounter with Lena Kauntz (otherwise to be found in the live line-ups of Yukno, Sharktank, Cousines Like Shit) at a party in Vienna that finally triggered the formation of the band. Seen in this light, ischia are the natural product of a currently flourishing Viennese indie scene. "I've been far too lucky. From second one everything somehow worked out, it's a bit absurd. In the right place at the right time," understates Adele Ischia. After all, even the best band chemistry would be nothing without the songs she and Hjörleifsson carved together.

"Sorry Mama" describes the everyday challenges in the life of a young woman, between mother's questions about when there will finally be children, the everyday defense against toxic masculinity, and the basic problem of maintaining one's own dignity in all of this ("maintaining my dignity"), and forms the softest possible, dreamiest kind of anthem from it.

"Fake", on the other hand, finds its way from a sunny Britpop verse to a grunge chorus with a Pixies/Breeders-like coda in a coherent but brute manner. "You think you are the victim while you are the source of every fucking tragedy", it says. As I said, there's a lot of humor in there, but also plenty of anger. "Is it you, cause I know it isn't me?" asks Ischia sarcastically in "Is it Gonna Last", a light-footed song that forges a previously undiscovered link between eighties pop, shoegaze and near-disco of the pulp school. Not a bad trick for a band that only got together just over a year ago.

In addition to the release of their album, ischia will also be performing together with Endless Wellness this year for practical reasons. Luckily, sometimes you don't have to take sides.

(Robert Rotifer)