by Sam Jennings (@Walt_Whitmensch)
Let us gather to praise the kids
Who do not seek to reinvent the wheel
For that is to misunderstand the wheel
Which, once begun, goes on
And on, as long as the circle may spin.
- The Last Cynic’s Ode
I suppose I didn’t want to write about music anymore, let alone listen to new shit: there’s enough past brilliance to dig up yet and besides, does anybody really believe in the future anymore? Me, I’d checked out because of health problems, rote depression, summer blues, pandemia…you know, you know, you’ve got it, too, got all that and more from the digital curse. At max burnout, sloping downwards, the way these things do sometimes, something came up and smacked me in the head, made its way through my waxy ears. A little Lightning Bug right on time. Hearing this record—from some kids I’d never known about until right then—I felt the way I hadn’t in a long time, like I wanted to rush out and tell everyone about this little band and hug them and play them its wondrous tracks in perfect sync with one of my perfect Missouri sunsets.
Besides urging you to listen to it yourself, what’s to report? It’s ten songs, solid and true. Not too precious. Not too spacey. I don’t know much about them. Don’t want to. I have no idea if this is a lateral move, a linear evolution, a trip-up, or some Brand New Thing. All I know is that I hope there will always be young people like this with the unadorned desire to carry patient feelings forward through the vast great American landscape, and all our foibles and loves.
“If I empty me of all my self/Am I vessel or a shell?” Audrey Kang sings on “Song of the Bell,” and it’s a great little phrase. Zen, almost. Or, probably, more ambivalent about what is ostensibly Zen. Evinces a real Millennial state, that line. Somewhere in between the desire for relief from contemporary bullshit, but also the fear of the possible Nothingness behind. At the very least, an uncertainty about Meaning, phrased simply enough; it hits me right where I live. The looming stutter-stomp and constant threatening clouds of the song give it a weight that’s necessary at the middle of such a languid record.
There’s the opener: “The Return,” immediately inviting you to relax, contemplate. The lyrics are spare and uncomplicated (though dig the warm, fey way she sings “Bought/Fought” and “Fire/Choir”), but the melody! Fantastic. Across the record she’s one of the best indie rock melodists around, and nobody’s gonna say it but I think it’s a fact: there’s a sturdiness to them. Above all is song-of-year-contender, “The Right Thing is Hard to Do,” which is Neil Young Great, Genius-Simple Great. A classic, with a real directness to it. That twang in the corners and that Cocteau Twins guitar at the end, and the chorus… it’s the rare moment a rock band manages to take something from the eternal recurrence of indie motifs and make from them something timeless.
The feeling and (yes) the color of it all… it’s brooding, sometimes very dark, sometimes warm. Takes place on the edges of a thunderstorm, yet also at the center of a glorious sunset. The landscape really is all-important: they may be from New York but the sensation is authentically Midwest-West. A feeling for the expansiveness, the enormity, the dwarfing possibilities of the American landscape. Which is missing from so much of the musical undercurrent (folkies included, who can commit to pastoralism but just don’t have the same breadth). I haven’t really heard anything so simpatico with the Great American Expanse since maybe Kacey Musgraves or, hell, possibly all the way back to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; and of course one hears the timbres of post-rock bands: Mogwai (but imagine foggy Scotland), Sigur Ros (same, with Icelandic vistas of igneous).
The rest is defiantly shoegaze, but here’s the thing about shoegaze… too many people are going to take and turn it into the defining quality of this album, call the Bug just another revivalist band, as if all indie music right now isn’t basically a chaotic array of revisionist/revivalist tendencies, not so much about forward movement as about maintaining that very wheel but see: that at its best is natural! It means we haven’t run out of things to do with established forms, sounds, evocations, connotations. The connotation here is fervently shoegaze, especially Slowdive and The Verve. Only, compared to A Color Of The Sky’s expanding stormy scape, the original ‘gaze was just too interior. So introverted it turns stifling, so you have to create a druggish, narcotic barrier—a haze—between you and it. MBV reverse-engineered all that, made it less interior, made it practically amniotic. Pre-birth, maybe even futurist, something so alien yet fetal; submerged in an unconscious, rather than confronted with brutal self-awareness of the kind Slowdive was escaping. Though those kids were glorious, too, don’t get me wrong. I love them all ways: fatalist-romantic, lethargic, spaced-out, laced-out, burnt-out, stoned. Yet that’s always been the problem with the genre: it’s focus simply isn’t on living, but drawing inward, avoiding, dulling yourself, blissing out. At its worst it’s just heroin.
Lightning Bug manages to bring it into 2021 with real spiritual yearning. Audrey Kang’s questions come from inside, sure, and she knows this, and she’s wrestling with them. She’s giving us these questions, too. They’re not pointless questions, they’re pretty good questions. She provides us with details along the way, tells stories in “September Song pt. ii,” laments poetry and words in the title track (which makes me sad cause you can take those things and also have your own good grand things to say—she proves so). On the whole, she’s questing. Like all great songwriters. Using the music, the landscape—the setting sun, the trees, the rolling plains, the endless country before her—using it to buoy, support, and give strength to her stories, her words, and her sense of the Self she’s questioning. What makes it work is the rhythm, running through tempestuous/languid, stormy/shimmering… a natural space, in other words, a space of Nature. The only proper place where this questioning can be done. As she would put it, she’s pointing her arrow towards the beauty she wants to believe. Only she says “I guess” right before that, which is wonderful: she’s not trying to be too certain about anything. Just navigating what she can. The way the band brings that Americana in at the edges, but transcends pure nostalgia with electronics, sounds, images, and those past ideas from the shoegazers really does set the stage for her personal inquiry. Not to get too holy, but Lightning Bug is a worthy prayer, even in a world without the future.