The Hidden Genre, pt 2: GREEN LUNG

Part 2 - GREEN LUNG

Last time, I described how I had been adrift on a sea of unexciting music, lacking direction. I wasn’t exactly bored of collecting music, but it had been a while since I’d really been fired up about it. Thankfully, a glimmer on the horizon appeared while I was scrolling through Facebook on or around November 15, 2023.

Social media is, of course, notorious for creating divisions among people. But its intended use is to make connections, and that capacity should be acknowledged and celebrated. So, I would like to thank a gentleman named Brian Phair, who was kind enough to post on a music collectors’ page about a band I had never heard of.

The band had just released a new album with a cool name and a cover that caught my eye. The cover wasn't necessarily an elevated work of art, but it was distinctive and stylish. I was intrigued, enough so to look up the album on a streaming service and give it a whirl:

I listened to the album all the way through, and then listened to it again. The experience was similar to meeting someone new - someone who seems a little too perfect. I didn’t want to get my hopes up without being more sure about it, but heavy metal and I go back a long, long way. Even though it’s not something I listen to on a daily basis anymore, it’s still close to my heart. And Green Lung’s update on the sound, combining some of the best parts of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Deep Purple, is shiny, sleek, and charismatic.

At the same time, in other ways the band is woolly and defiant, and a little bit dangerous. It’s a potent combination.

At that point in my music collecting career, I wasn't in the habit of buying new, full price CDs. But I’ve been a musician myself, and I do like to support other musicians when it's reasonable for me to do so. These days, one of the best ways to support the artists is to purchase merchandise from them. But for a collector on a budget, a new CD plus shipping is a bit of an investment. So, just to be sure, I listened to the album all the way through for a third time before I placed my order with the record label.

Of course, doing one's due diligence is generally a great thing. But after the one-two punch of the album’s first pair of songs, I really needn't have bothered.

"Forest Church" throws sparks with swagger and precision. My favorite moment is the single chord in the intro that makes it sound like the guitar is in an alternate, dropped tuning – the chord seems even lower than a standard low E chord. Best of all, it's used sparingly. The listener is given just a quick taste of that low, low growl, and the effect is like a shot of adrenaline. Meanwhile, the second song, "Mountain Throne," is even more thrilling - it charges out of the gate like a stallion when the bell is rung.

The rest of the songs may not hit with quite the same force, but the crucial thing is this: THIS HEATHEN LAND, as a whole, lives up to the promise of the first pair of songs. In addition to the spoken word intro, there are eight tunes, and the band does a superb job of mixing up the moods. The album hits a lot of notes, from righteous to wistful to esoterically horny.

And in my opinion, they do it convincingly. Throughout are little flashes of brilliance. The album is a generous serving of expertly incorporated arrangement hooks, like unexpected one-measure instrumental breaks, and stanzas where the instruments suddenly drop out, leaving only the vocals.

My very favorite of these – what I like to think of as the Essential Moment of the album – occurs at 04:29 in “The Ancient Ways,” but it’s set up by a short, quick guitar riff that leads into the first couple of chori. You can hear it at 01:21 and 02:30, a two-beat guitar noodle right before the drums and cymbals crash in with the chorus. (I’ve heard it referred to as a “tag” so I’m going to go with that.) In itself, the tag isn’t particularly savage or funky. Instead, it gets its strength by creating an expectation.

Following the second chorus, the band has just taken a quiet, spacy detour for the third verse. The only lyric is a quote by naturalist John Muir:

“The clearest way to the universe,

Is through a forest wilderness…”

The third verse has a different feel than the earlier ones, but it wraps up the same way, and the listener is subconsciously ready for the chorus to arrive again – including the guitar tag right before the cymbals crash. Instead, we hear the same tag – but not played by the guitar! The guitar has been replaced by something that sounds like a carnival organ, and that quick moment of surprise is completely juiced by what follows - the real-deal raging NWOBH-style guitar solo that arrives in majestic fashion, along with the cymbals and drums. It’s a real face-melting moment!

I love it when bands have those little touches built into their music. It indicates that they’ve taken time and care when building the song. That's the craftsmanship. And when it’s a young, hungry band on the rise, a band that’s out there making it happen RIGHT NOW, that makes it even more subtly thrilling.

Here’s a sample:

Speaking of guitar solos, it’s worth mentioning that throughout THIS HEATHEN LAND the guitars strike a very generous balance between crunchy and melodic. That’s another potent combination.

Then, the lyrics must be considered. To give you an idea of the subject matter, I think it's fair to quote the Prologue in full. It's the spoken-word text of the intro song and it's also printed on the back of the CD.

"Beyond the cities and motorways of modern Britain, away from the influence of its Christian churches and cathedrals, lies another country. An older, stranger country. A country of lonely tors and desolate moors, of forgotten woods and mysterious standing stones. You are about to embark on a journey into occult Albion."

Perhaps that's putting too fine a point on it, but sometimes that’s what a situation calls for.

It's definitely true that subtlety is a distinct disadvantage sometimes. Nevertheless, being cryptic and overly subtle comes naturally to me. I think it's an outgrowth of my belief that there's very little in our practical lives that’s purely black or white. Yes, it's every shade of gray, but it's also the full spectrum of every color in between - every color imaginable.

The point of which is, every listener makes their own choices as far as what lyrics they want to listen to. In my formative years, I was drawn to certain bands that had occult-ish and/or Satanic lyrics, while at the same time I kept a separate mental list of bands that I thought of as being in a different category: bands with lyrics that were outside my comfort level. Too satanic, too violent, too evil...

But for me, that line was always kinda fuzzy.

I had mapped it based, at least partially, on my religious beliefs of the time. Even then, some choices made little sense. In my teenage analysis, Black Sabbath was too dark, but I had a serious affair with Iron Maiden. Likewise, while I had long been turned off by lyrics about sex, I made a big exception for Led Zeppelin.

Later on, when rap had become impossible to ignore, I thought most of it was too violent and bleak. But, the gleeful nihilism of Cypress Hill was irresistible.

Fuzzy or not, the borders we delineate for ourselves tend to drift over time, as do our justifications for those lines. Many people reevaluate their religious beliefs at some point in their lives, and that was certainly true for me. I’ll be touching on this again in future entries, but what’s important now is recognizing that when those internal shifts happen, we may also find that the music which once seemed frightening and dangerous no longer holds that power over us.

In short, Hell becomes much less scary if you decide that it doesn’t really exist.

I’m more motivated to talk about music than religion as I go forward with this, but I’ll be blunt: there’s going to be some overlap. I’ll do my best to be honest about it, hopefully without being heavy-handed. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be perfectly diplomatic in every situation, but I’ll do my best to keep the focus on the music, rather than bashing anyone’s beliefs. I realize it’s important to be respectful, but writing genuinely and from the heart is also a priority. And obviously, in the same way that listeners make their own decisions about what to listen to, you, the reader, will be making your own decisions about what to read.

I’m planning to circle back around later to talk more about Green Lung – I haven’t even gotten to the singer’s voice yet! But setting the scene is what needs to be done here at the outset. Green Lung played an important part in getting the wheels turning, but I was in search of something more expansive than heavy metal. I wanted a framework that would include bands like Green Lung, but also a bunch of other stuff.

Very soon, a much different band would enter the picture, and the possibility of a whole new genre would begin to come into focus.

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GREEN LUNG is:

Tom Templar – vocals

Scott Black – guitar

Joseph Ghast – bass

Matt Wiseman – drums

John Wright – organ

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Green Lung discography:

THIS HEATHEN LAND, 2023 Nuclear Blast Records

BLACK HARVEST, 2021 Svart Records

WOODLAND RITES, 2019 self-released

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Green Lung can be found on Bandcamp, Facebook, and at their website.

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Join me every four weeks as I chronicle my discovery of a whole new genre of music...