Live EPs are usually the stopgap of the established or the souvenir of the famous. Flame have turned the form into a manifesto. Recording in the room where the songs were built, with no studio varnish to hide behind, is a dangerous decision for a young group, and the danger is the point. The rawness is the record's chief pleasure. Amps hum, drums breathe, and a vocal is allowed to crack if the feeling demands it. It is the sound of people trusting one another, and the trust is amply repaid.
Fiammetta Nisio fronts the band, and her voice is the record's great good fortune. It is a powerhouse instrument, but it is never merely loud. It can soar in the manner of Dolores O'Riordan and then fold inward with the hushed ache of Jeff Buckley, and the drama lies in never knowing which way it will turn. Those comparisons come with the press material, yet the ear does not argue with them. Nisio sings as though the words cost her something, and that is a rarer quality than technique.
Around her, the band builds something the release calls prog-gaze, a tag that sounds like marketing until the music arrives to justify it. Shoegaze guitars shimmer and blur, while the structures stretch outward with a patience Porcupine Tree would recognise. Then the floor shifts. Grunge grit arrives, a funk pulse loosens the hips, and a soft-rock warmth takes the edge off the gloom. Stitching those textures together without visible seams is tricky. Less assured groups would sound like a playlist, but Flame sound like a single temperament working through its moods.
The singles *Naive* and *Heat* announced the band's appetite for emotional risk, and the earlier *Gravity* hinted at a folk-inflected tenderness beneath the noise. *Medea In Blue* gathers those threads and makes them sound inevitable. The songs ask existential questions and, admirably, do not insult the listener by answering them. Doubt, desire and self-reproach are left hanging in the air, where they belong, and the playing has the loose-limbed urgency of a band who know they are being watched and choose to burn anyway.
Maddie Lennon's cover, all electric blue and acid yellow around a ghostly drowned figure, tells you much of what you need to know. It is beautiful and unsettling in equal measure, and so is the music. The title is a fitting one, since blue is the colour of cold water and of sadness, while Medea is a woman of fire. Flame have named themselves after one element and built a record from the tension between it and another.
Flame have headlined King Tut's and won the ear of BBC Introducing Scotland, and this EP explains why. It is fierce, complex and achingly human, and the band behind it have a great deal more to say. Do not look away.