“I want you to feel what I feel,” she says before possessing his shaking body. He has already removed the slipcase from Geist. Then, everything else becomes music and a turmoil of emotions piercing every cell of his surrendered skin. He feels her cold sweat and the incandescence of her flushed cheeks the first time she laid her eyes on him, the voltage in the lines of her lips the first time they kissed, the swelling of their Sunday pillow-fight bruise on her back, her heart ablaze when she said “Go away and never come back.” He feels her endless pain, the saltiness of her dried tears, her emptiness hanging from the rooftop.
This rollercoaster of feelings cannot be ignored. Long lasting, electro-eerie sounds dominate his psyche throughout the 45 minute metaphysical experience. A sonic pattern is also omnipresent; the metronome rhythm, the repetitive structure, the reflective tempo and the wooden texture of this group of sonic elements are so persistent that, combined with the whirlwind of repeated phrases — “Come back up here / Come back up here / You will lose again,” “Gonna take you down / Gonna take you down,” “Oh, how I trusted you / Oh, how I trusted you” — transform into thousands of earworms slowly and carefully spreading inside every inch of his spinning head; like an act of delicate brainwashing.
For pleasure’s sake, there’s straight-forward EBM and new wave hints (“LA On Mondays,” “Silver”) as well as sexy dance pop notes fused to the atmosphere with some alternative rock and trip-hop colours (“Back Up,” “Stay Awake,” “Heist,” “Tonight”, “So Long”), revealing themselves as time goes by. Although the music stays at the forefront, he grasps her voice echoing and dwelling like a feather in the hazy background. There lies his own voice too, responding to her callings; their late hour discussions becoming a choir of all the things unspoken.
The music stops. “Heiliger Geist! This time I truly saw into her. We truly saw into each other. But did we have to lose each other first?” Gang Signs does not present the answer in Geist, but they do create the momentum of reflection. How far can we go into a relationship? What does it take to simply understand each other?
