Album review! White Lung - Paradise

Vancouver punk-rockers put out a record that cleverly managed to find just the right balance between the feral onslaughts of previous albums and a new more softened and polished sound that makes for one of the most rewarding rock listening experiences of 2016 so far and a solid candidate for best punk rock album of the year.

Just by giving a quick listen to the singles that led up to this new project It was very clear from the get-go that Paradise wasn’t going to be just another repetition of the sound they clearly had mastered on albums like Deep Fantasy or Sorry and that’s precisely Paradise’s biggest strength.  Singles like “Hungry”, “Kiss Me When I Bleed” and the sort of ballad “Below”, while retaining White Lung’s essence, also showcased an unusual melodic quality to Mish Way’s usual raspy, ferocious vocals and a wiser, more complex production that made it very clear Paradise had the potential to become a career-changing record for White Lung.

Whether or not this record will be considered a game-changer for the band is yet to be seen but one thing is for sure: This album is their most polished, balanced, accessible record to date and those who thought White Lung’s trademark aggressive assaults were going to be completely blown out of the water on this record have another thing coming as Paradise’s fiercest moments sound as wild as you would expect coming from a band like White Lung only that this time around they channeled their usual punk brutality differently and the results are as hard-hitting as they are cerebral and appealing.

On Deep Fantasy White Lung proved that apart from sounding totally badass, Mish Way’s lyrics can be exceptionally smart too so it’s nice to see one of Paradise’s defining traits is strong, relatable, kind of twisted lyrics and of course, as usual, this is all accompanied by Anne-Marie Vassiliou’s steady, reliable drumming and Kenneth William’s frantic, almost neurotic guitar work that infuses almost every song here with a very distinctive and unique vibe proving once again his talent is as crucial to the band as Mish Way’s rad vocal delivery.

The album opens with “Dead Weight”, a track that could’ve easily been on Deep Fantasy and contains a few warped lyrical passages of many you’ll come across next, like the verse that kicks off the song (“A pound of flesh lays between my legs and eyes; secure the sutures, he'll grow beneath the ties”) and a chorus that goes “I am a wash now without a life to please and I know the hole inside of me is not the way I ever want to be; I'm gone”.

The next track, “Narcoleptic”, is one of the album’s most intense songs both lyrically and sonically and one of my personal favorites here. Not only is it instrumentally great but it goes deeper into the dark side in the songwriting department (“Stuff me full of septic, I'll become narcoleptic”) and Mish  Way makes use of a few crafty metaphors to convey the song’s latent underlying anxiety.

What follows is probably the album’s strongest set of songs starting with “Below”, which is possibly White Lung’s catchiest track to date alongside “Hungry” and according to Mish Way, “It’s a song about the preservation of glamour and beauty.”  Then it’s time for another standout track and a satisfyingly catchy single, “Kiss Me When I Bleed”, which is basically a love song, albeit a White Lung style love song (“I will give birth in a trailer, huffing the gas in the air. Baby is born in molasses, like I would even care” or “I got a basic need; kiss me when I bleed”). Once again the production is fantastic and very clean on both tracks.

The next song is called “Demented” and not only does it provide the record with another sort of bummed out, gloomy chorus (“You were born to ruin your life; you were sworn into a bad, bad wife, this is a sad, sad life”) but also with some of the most head-banging moments here, particularly towards the end of the song when a heavy, straight out of the metal book guitar riff kicks in before the song fades away.

“Sister” isn’t as crushing as “Demented” but it doesn’t fall too short either and “Hungry” is another example of catchy song development, blending tongue-in-cheek references like “Baby, you’re weak, baby, you’re starving; the star will melt, we’re all hungry for it” with some nice, meticulous instrumentation.  The last 3 tracks do a very good job keeping things interesting even though none of them quite reaches the highest quality peaks already reached in previous cuts. The title track certainly feels like a more than fitting ending to the album.

On the whole, I think this record completely blows away any possible doubt that White Lung could’ve started losing steam and power and it shows that they only found a more mature and satisfyingly nuanced way to express all that raw energy that makes White Lung one of the most impressive punk rock acts out there right now and it also makes “Paradise” their best LP to date in my opinion, and for a band with such a strong discography quality-wise that means prepare yourself to have oodles of fun because this is definitely one of the best albums of the year so far.

You can listen to the whole record in the link down below!

https://whitelung.bandcamp.com/

Album review! Pity Sex - White Hot Moon

Ann Arbor shoegazers return with a sophomore album that is as far from being groundbreaking as it is packed with the same intimate reflections on love meet melancholic, musing passages formula that made its predecessor a listening experience as pleasantly likeable as this new record turns out to be.

Perhaps the biggest compliment that can be said about White Hot Moon (and probably about Pity Sex for that matter) is that what they may lack on innovation they excel at style and lyricism. Pity Sex have always worn their influences on their sleeve and personally, I don’t believe that thinking of names like My Bloody Valentine or Lush (which by the way released a very interesting come back EP a few weeks ago) while listening to modern music is necessarily a bad thing; on the contrary, in Pity Sex’s case while their music is highly influenced by their fuzzy-pop rock heroes but its unique, youthful yet ironically apathetic approach makes their music stand out even if at this point that doesn’t make up for the freshest sound out there.

Pity Sex’s biggest strength is precisely on the songwriting department and once again singer- guitarists Brennan Greaves and Britty Drake spend most of their time here looking at the past in and figuring out how to deal with all the things that went out wrong in that past (especially regarding that strange thing called love, of course) and also dealing with how that makes them feel as a person. The band are clearly at their best when they deal with these topics and they are aware of that, which sometimes isn’t that great because your ears will inevitably start getting a strong feeling of Deja vu sooner or later into the record that will only grow stronger if you’ve also listened to Feast of Love before.

However, most of the time the results are highly enjoyable because let’s be honest, they sure can put together standout, catchy, melancholy-driven songs like few other bands in the genre at the moment can. For people their age I find it very interesting how much Greaves and Drake seem to be concerned by this sort of fear of being alone; in fact, on the track “Burden You” Drake even seems to find some kind of relief or peace making sure the guy she’s singing about can’t get over her: “I’ll always think of your lips when I’m movin' mine against his. I wanna know I wanna know. That I’m burning in your mind also. Don’t let me go don’t let me go. I’m your burden--you’re mine to swallow.”

Other tracks like the title track and even more noticeably “Wappen Beggars” with passages like “It’s too long a time to be alone. Silken love, satin getaway, don’t we look good, don’t we feel great. Silken love, hanging over me” head down the same I really don’t want to be alone road. Even the most brisk-paced, almost upbeat at times track on the album, “Orange and Red” is pretty much a song about loving intensely and avoiding loneliness: “I’ll follow you if you follow me too” Drake keeps repeating until the very end of the song.

“Bonhomie” comes off like a kind of weird yet very catchy track where what appears to be Greaves’ auto-tuned voice singing UFO metaphors kicks the song off before finally getting to the point in a way more direct manner: “You love me. You love me not”. One of the slowest, most intimate tracks, “Plum”, also happens to be one of the most engaging not only because sonically speaking it adds some variety to the generally uniform sound of the band but also because it provides the album with moments of strong emotional intensity, as Drake’s folky vocals reminiscent of Katie Crutchfield, approach her mother’s death with heart-wrenching honesty and sorrow.

“Nothing Rips through Me” is interesting in that when we listen to Greaves’ brooding, deadpan vocals saying he’s okay we don’t believe him at all and honestly, that’s the song’s biggest triumph. Nature seems to play a very important role throughout the album as well and it’s White Hot Moon’s number one source of metaphors, to the point where tracks like “September” pretty much revolve entirely around their nature-infused rhetoric. 

It does feel like they played things a bit too safe here and I can see why some people might see that as somewhat of a step back in the sense that instrumentally speaking they didn’t really take any risks but at the same time I do believe White Hot Moon is more sharply written than Feast of Love, perhaps not necessarily in content but certainly in style, and for a band as heavily influenced by poetry when it comes to songwriting that’s already an improvement on itself and also a certain type of risk; a modest one, true, but still a risk nevertheless.

Instrumentally speaking Pity Sex’s delivery is rather discreet, relying heavily on fuzzy guitars and reverb effects as usual and sometimes things might even get a bit repetitive which is a problem Feast of Love didn’t suffer from but for the most part not only does White Hot Moon hit all the right notes that made Feast of Love such a good record to begin with but also their compositional skills are more complex and stylish this time around. 

White Hot Moon might not exactly be a game changer in the shoegaze pop-rock canon but it is a very good follow-up to its predecessor and taking that into account it does something very few sophomore records in rock music do: it lives up to the level of quality preceding it all the while making the best out of its slightly more than 39 minutes of length all of which breeze by as if the album were only 15 minutes long and for me, that’s always a good sign. 

You can listen to the whole record in the link down below!

https://runforcoverrecords.bandcamp.com/album/white-hot-moon

The Raven

Alfred Hitchcock is, without doubt, one of my favorite filmmakers of all times, probably in my personal top 3, and to me he’s the guy who redefined the concepts of mystery and suspense in cinema, much like Edgar Allan Poe redefined (and sometimes defined) those concepts in literature. On Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Hitchcock once said: “It’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films. Without wanting to seem immodest, I can’t help but compare what I try to put in my films with what Poe put in his stories: a perfectly unbelievable story recounted to readers with a hallucinatory logic that one has the impression that this same story can happen to you tomorrow.”

Personally, I couldn’t agree more with Hitchcock on that and what makes things even more interesting, is that not only was Poe capable of capturing that unique and tense atmosphere Hitchcock praised so much through his more short stories but he managed to pull exactly the same string through his poetic works as well, and he did that with unique consistency and mind-boggling  ease; in that sense, to my mind, what he accomplished with The Raven hasn’t ever been matched in terms of style and atmosphere by any other author ever since, which is why The Raven is probably my favorite poem of all times.

Picking up on Hitchcock words, I think what makes The Raven stick out even more than its wonderfully mysterious tone, is precisely how natural and perfectly believable everything feels and I have a personal interpretation for that.  I think for anyone who’s ever read the poem the narrator’s sense of grief and torment about his lover Lenore is clearly palpable throughout many passages of the story but I personally feel like that’s tightly related to the presence of the raven itself.

I think, by the way he speaks about his lost “rare and radiant maiden”, that he feels not only utterly affected but perhaps even responsible for whatever caused Lenore’s absence; he is definitely full of regrets and clearly, he never got to overcome all those feelings of remorse and sorrow that were driving him mad and this is precisely what I think the raven stands for in the poem: that it doesn’t matter how hard he tries to find inner peace and to erase how bitter and melancholic Lenore’s figure makes him feel, what’s done can’t be undone and the raven, a relentless representation of his own conscience, will always be there to remind him that his  “soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted—nevermore!.”

I think those are feelings we can all understand and sort of connect with and for me, that’s what makes The Raven so freakishly plausible despite its somewhat fantastic tone, which is to say, in Hitchcock’s words, that’s what gave The Raven that hallucinatory logical vibe that worked out so well and that definitely helped the poem become so timelessly popular and ultimately acquire the cult status that it still holds today.

Whatever your interpretation of the poem might be, like all good poems, the amount of possible levels/interpretation on which The Raven works amazingly well seems to be pretty much endless and that’s something you can get from poetry, particularly from good poetry, that makes poetry such a beautiful and unexpected journey. The Raven was the first poem I ever read that thoroughly made me love poetry and it showed to me that, when done right and when it clicks with you, the intensity with which a poem can conjure up all sorts of feelings, thoughts and sensations remains unrivaled in literature.

As a curiosity, it is said that an early draft of The Raven had an owl in it instead of a raven (which would’ve been incredibly awesome because I ADORE owls!). Alfred Hitchcock once said, comparing both Poe’s and his own style: “We are both prisoners of a genre: “suspense”. You know the story that one has recounted many, many times: if I was making “Cinderella,” everyone would look for the corpse. And if Edgar Allan Poe had written “Sleeping Beauty,” one would look for the murderer. “

Edgar Allan Poe is the type of author that even if you started reading a story written by him without knowing it was actually written by him, you would still recognize his personal stamp sooner or later and the fact that he was able to translate all the traits that made him a one of a kind author (especially when it comes to very short stories) so perfectly into a genre like poetry to such a extent that you can still sense when a poem was written by him, exactly as you would if you were reading one of his short stories, is what makes Edgar Allan Poe the unforgettable testament to literature that he is, and I honestly can’t think of a better example of that achievement than The Raven.