The Madrid band Izal said goodbye on Saturday and Friday in a big way, with two final concerts at the Wizink Center in Madrid, both events with sold-out tickets that serve to put the finishing touch to the pop band’s career after deciding to put end to its trajectory of more than 10 years. As the title of one of his most famous songs, Izal went on hiatus this weekend, an “indefinite” break of those that sometimes announce bands that never come back, all the more reason to attract more than 30,000 people between the two nights .
As the closing of a tour that also had the name “Hogar”, the same name as their fifth and last studio album, there was no more appropriate place for the eventual farewell than Madrid, the city where this band was born, and the space that in the past confirmed them as one of the main swords of the Spanish indie, the Wizink Center. And this is how Mikel Izal himself recognized it on Friday at the microphone: “Thank you very much not only for filling this night but also because in this city you have always made us feel like family and home.”
With the maximum and complete capacity, in both appointments, the five members of the group have carried out a balanced review for each of the five of their careers that will have made the fans who have been with them since their beginnings in 2012 with “Magic and special effects”.
The public vibrated with each song and sang each chorus, in an exciting concert in which the band reviewed the greatest hits of their career. Among the two dozen cuts, there was no shortage of essentials such as Copacabana, El baile, the aforementioned Pausa just before the encores or the final brooch with La mujer de verde, but also others that, seen together in panoramic mode, seem to have been written for this moment: Prologue, Farewell, I have returned or the recent Meiuqèr, which is nothing but the reverse of Requiem.
There was not much of an elegy in those four hours of concert (two per night), experienced more like a party since Mikel Izal (vocalist, composer, guitar), Emanuel Pérez “Gato” (bass), Alejandro Jordá (drums and percussion), Alberto Pérez (guitar, Lap Steel) and Iván Mella (piano, keyboards, synthesizers).
Just before, the performance showed in black and white on the screens of the venue its previous huddle and the triumphant walk to the stage, as if underlining the documentary value of a historical occasion.
“Everything is ready for the penultimate photo,” Mikel Izal announced on Friday night from his position as the trigger for the explosive start with El pozo, a stampede that Jordá’s battery then kept clean with a clean smack with Delicate Subjects, in alliance with the spidical progressions to Mella’s synthesizer.
A good start that they underpinned even more with that roadside bar and neon lights that is Copacabana, the clapping of the crowd acting as drumsticks and their passionate choirs before one of the group’s most emblematic choruses: “It’s a blink, a quick flash , a ray of sun that leaves blind”. “It’s the dream farewell for a band to which so many dream things have happened,” said the Basque vocalist then before lowering the beats with Meiuqer on the ukulele.
With “The beings that fill me up” they had a funny tribute to the figure of the “companion”, the one “who doesn’t know a single song by Izal” but who comes in support of his partner and, in a roundabout way, helps to leave the ticket office; also, just before playing Wormholes, for all those who through crowdfunding helped pay for the first two albums of a line-up that has remained faithful to record independence ever since.
In strictly musical terms, however, the concert had embarked throughout this central section in a somewhat dense nebula that has begun to dissipate in search of the energy of the start with Stage Fright and Autotherapy.
There were no more resignations in the ten salvos made until the closing, from The incredible story of the man who could fly but did not know how, through Magic and special effects (dedicated to his manager, Manuel Notario) to the festival-goer El baile, with which paraded around the stage even an inflatable T-Rex.
Solo Pausa then imposed something of that idem, a momentary repose, overwhelmingly illuminated and with an electric, cathartic and crescendo finale that was among the best of the show, later topped off with a descent to the foot of the track with How good and, por last, with a see you later (or a see you always) to the first great success of her career, The Woman in Green.
