Things change. And we get it, you fear change. You liked it when they weren’t a name on anyone’s lips. You liked it when you could drop them into a conversation and receive a blank stare in response. You liked it when their distribution was a few hundred LPs and a Bandcamp page. You liked it when they had one speed: getthefuckouttaourway. But with ‘Paradise’, White Lung don’t care what you used to like about them. They care about what the band is today and what it might become in the future.
‘Deep Fantasy’, released back in 2014, drew a line under White Lung’s thrilling tenure as a straight up hardcore band. It was every bit as good as the breakneck ‘Sorry’, if a little more long-winded at 22 whole minutes, but existed on a different plain in terms of its brooding heaviness and Mish Barber-Way’s teeth-bared discussions of rape culture, body image, narcotics and power dynamics. 'Paradise’ is another step to the left of where you might have expected them to go.
It’s the band’s most melodic record and another leap forward for Barber-Way as a vocalist. It’ll get under your skin and hang around, with her bright, bold hooks sparring with Kenneth William’s continually confounding, often electrifying guitar work. This is an album that hews close to pop territory, but it’s also mercilessly precise and, at times, brutal in its execution. That a recent playlist detailing influences on ‘Paradise’ featured Stevie Nicks, Chvrches and Metallica alongside the deeply underrated Swedish goth-punks Terrible Feelings is not as much of a surprise as it might appear.
"I was not distracted by a singular guitar part drilling into my head. I had the space to separate myself.” - Mish Barber-Way
This time around Barber-Way and William, with the band completed by drummer Anne-Marie Vassiliou, kept their distance from one another during the writing process. That’s why the almost symbiotic relationship between their melodies that characterised ‘Deep Fantasy’ now lies in a heap on the cutting room floor. “We worked separately,” Barber-Way said. “I wrote everything in the studio with a complete song in front of me, so I was not distracted by a singular guitar part drilling into my head. I had the space to separate myself.”
William, meanwhile, used the time to do all kinds of weird shit. ‘Paradise’ was recorded in Los Angeles with producer Lars Stalfors, who has recently worked on HEALTH’s ‘Death Magic’ and Stillbirth, Alice Glass’s solo bow, and its construction is fiendish in its layered complexity.
Every inch of space has been meticulously filled, with William’s guitar in a state of constant flux. The first 10 seconds of Dead Weight, the record’s opening statement, feature enough twists to keep five meat and potatoes rock bands in business for a year. But it’s the sharp edges that really do the damage. Every idea here is clipped and pointed, with no concession to warmth, and to cap it all off William went ahead and wiped the slate clean at the end of it. Ditch your laurels and you can’t rest on them.
“For about six months before we went to LA to record I forced myself to record a new guitar part on my phone every day,” William said. “I would move them into my laptop and try different combinations of them together, change the keys and reverse them to try to come up with chord changes and melodic lines that I wouldn’t normally think of playing. Because of the way I wrote the parts it seemed fitting to record the actual album that way too, so it was put together the same way an electronic record would be. At the end of recording I deleted all the stuff that didn’t make it onto the album so it won’t be recycled for anything else.”
"At the end of recording I deleted all the stuff that didn’t make it onto the album so it won’t be recycled for anything else.” - Kenneth William
An intriguing contrast arises when you get hold of the lyric sheet. On ‘Paradise’ we find Barber-Way in a different place. As she recently told Annie Clark for the band’s new bio, she’s married, happy and, when she’s not treading the boards, enjoys her writing career. Love, in its many guises, is one of the defining threads that runs through her work on ‘Paradise’, informing her melodies and running contrary to William’s razor-sharp riffs. “The rest is just distraction,” she recently said in an interview with Jennifer Herrema for Pamela Love. “Family, friends and love are the only important accomplishments in life. That's the shit that matters when you are 85.”
The record spins on Barber-Way stepping outside of herself regularly for the first time, employing narratives and thematic investigations alongside lucid character sketches. The result is a white trash fairytale like Kiss Me When I Bleed, where a rich girl and trailer park guy are the star crossed lovers, sharing a table with a searing examination of self-involvement and the isolated glare of the spotlight on Hungry. Below, meanwhile, uses a Camille Paglia quote as a staging ground for Barber-Way’s paean to glamorous women and the preservation of beauty.
“Lyrics take form naturally,” she said. “I hear the song, I have these ideas batting around inside my head and I edit and edit and edit until I create the perfect images, the strongest, most vivid words. The choice to explore writing from a less autobiographical standpoint gave me all this fictional freedom I really wanted.”
On Sister, the two strands of Barber-Way’s writing cross. The song, which wouldn’t have looked out of place of ‘Deep Fantasy’, picks up on a report she wrote for Broadly last autumn investigating cases of women who kill alongside their husbands. Much of the piece focused on KarlaHomolka and Paul Bernardo, who between them presided over the rape and murder of three girls, including Homolka’s sister, in Ontario during the early ‘90s. Sister wades further into their crimes and is an unremittingly bleak, distressing three and a half minutes. “We will cement you into garbage,” Barber-Way sings. “I swear I’ll miss all of you.”
“Homolka had great lawyers,” Barber-Way said. “She only got 12 years for torturing, raping and murdering three young girls, including her own sister. She’s a mother now. She’s lives with her three kids and a husband. I wanted to write a song from her voice talking to her dead sister. Can you imagine drugging your own teenage sister so that you could present her virginity as a present for your husband?
"I wanted to write a song from her voice talking to her dead sister." - Mish Barber-Way
“I could go through that whole song and explain each line because it’s all details of the murders and her relationship to Bernardo. I imagined Karla’s demented jealousy when Paul would rape their captives. I thought about her weakness and her sociopathology. Her need for attention and love.
"How she would bond with the victims, sharing her make-up and perfume, playing dress up, but then later that night she would be raping the girl with a wine bottle. Then, even later, upstairs decompressing as Paul took the dead girl downstairs to be chopped into pieces, cast into cement and thrown into a river. I am so curious about Karla. I will never stop being obsessed with her. How does she live today? How does she not fear her children will find out who she is?”
On an album so focused on the good things in life, the song has the power to stop you in your tracks. White Lung aren’t the first band to both embrace and subvert the power of a melody, but that balance is rarely maintained this close to a knife edge. There are pop songs here that previously would have seemed an impossible leap, just as there is wild-eyed romance and near unimaginable darkness. ‘Paradise’ makes no apologies.
White Lung Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Tue May 24 2016 - BRIGHTON Green Door Store
Wed May 25 2016 - BRISTOL Start The Bus
Thu May 26 2016 - LONDON Dalston Victoria
Fri May 27 2016 - BIRMINGHAM Flapper
Sat May 28 2016 - LEEDS Brudenell Social Club
Sun May 29 2016 - MANCHESTER Star And Garter
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