I started putting down random notes for this one over the past few weeks, starting from when I returned from shows in France in Belgium late this past month (January) in fact. It was indeed just had a random sprawl of ideas jumbled together. I think how I’ll introduce this track is to share the fact that I think I listened to this track about thirty times in a row upon return from those travels. Yes, that many. I don’t know why the obsessive repeats but I hope to make more sense of that as this entry goes along.
Why Lungfish? I seem to have an abstract, fleeting memory of talking to a random person I didn’t know at a festival I recently played in Paris and myself and this person started talking about the 90s hardcore music I grew up with. That person mentioned Lungfish — ah yes, I know that band. A somewhat misunderstood band and I had been appreciating them more in recent times and I said “I think I get them now” — not like I didn’t before. In my teenage years of being absolutely emersed in that scene I remember having their 1994 album Pass And Stow and their 1996 album Sound In Time on compact disc. I remember liking them at the time, but in hindsight I didn’t appreciate the full scope of what they were doing as they were on a different energy level compared to the firecracker energy of punk I was buzzing with at the time.
Usually in these entries I’ll get into a bit of a back story about the artist in question. I can’t really say I have any authority with Lungfish‘s history. They’re a bit of an enigma. They never did interviews at the time, never any standard “album promotion” and seemed to exist in their own parallel universe. Bits and pieces of their mystical puzzle have been attempted in explanation over the years, such as these two articles below which might assist in getting the uninitiated — likely someone like you, the reader — to get some vague, general idea of where the band’s source energy comes from:
It would seem the music of Lungfish came to the musicians that make up the band from some different plane, channeled through the band — especially through vocalist/lyricist Daniel Higgs, who to me (and many others) seemed to be some ancient time traveller from another dimension. His words seemed cosmic and full of rich imagery.
Most of the group’s compositions seem to be often just one phrase — sometimes two or variations on this one phrase. The tone varies from dense guitar noise over driving mid-tempos to more subdued, less distorted minimal pieces. Some of their tracks I gravitate far more to others, even with the band sticking to this formula over a dozen albums. At best — for me anyway — I find myself swallowed up in their tracks that feature more noisy repetition, which can at times feel like chiming, organic machine loops. The guitar lines can at times be gorgeously engineered with the vocals of Daniel Higgs sitting at just the right level as the band become one unified sound. Elements of psychedelia, trance, dub and noise rock are evident but never feel forced. It’s all coming from some other place.
It’s the trance of repetition I appreciate more these days. I can visualise parallels to how some listeners ingest their compositions as perhaps an avid listener of repetitive, psychedelic techno/electronic music might get when going down a mental tunnel listening to hynotic repetition. It’s a feeling I apply put this parallel to, especially as over the past twenty some-odd years electronic music fills out my listening patterns a lot more than when I was first listening to post-hardcore in the 1990s.
I have thought how some of their guitar passages could easily cross over into more textural, darker post-punk, which is far more prevalent these days with the ever, ongoing post-punk revival. If anything some of Lungfish‘s guitar passages are more carefully engineered with smaller details that are — at least to me — a lot more interesting than some of the guitar work in modern post-punk, which can at times not really feel that adventurous and more referencing first wave bands that came before.
And while I was going through this intense, short phase of listening to a long list of Lungfish tracks, for some odd reason parallel thoughts to a band like Simple Minds came to mind. On the surface it seems like a weird comparison but it made sense in my mind, if only to make this comparison from a specific period of Simple Minds‘ output — namely the 1980 album Empires And Dance and the two releases that came out in 1981 — sometimes treated as one double release — Sons And Fascination/Sister Feelings Call.
First off, both bands from these relative periods were pulling influence from genres such as krautrock — albeit in very different ways — and the trance-like hypnotism of looping repetition. Lungfish‘s Daniel Higgs and Simple Minds‘ Jim Kerr had a vaguely similar vocal approach in which they channeled heady and vast topics into long, verbose passages that were large and seemingly cosmic in scale, with a unique vocal style that’s often singing but with a lot of speech-like mannerisms in their delivery. The arrangements are lush and at times lengthy. There’s probably an essay buried in there outlining the inspirations and style of both bands, but these are some of my initial observations.
Maybe Simple Minds had their “Lungfish” moment with tracks such as “New Gold Dream” and “Theme For Great Cities”, and even earlier tracks like “This Fear Of Gods”. I already have something on the go for Simple Minds so I’ll save that for an entry here soon, but thought I’d write down this viewpoint just to pose a point of interest.
Come to think of it, Higgs & Kerr sounds like a travelling vaudeville show.
I can’t say I have a favourite Lungfish album, but perhaps 1994’s Pass And Stow is a good start. Pretty much all of their discography has been released on Washington DC’s legendary Dischord Records, and all up on BandCamp for those to hear.
As a final note, singer Daniel Higgs also works in the written and visual mediums, having released at least one book of poetry and working often as a painter in mystical art, of which I’ve included a video below from more recent times of him working in his studio. There’s a young boy offering some input here — who may or may not be a child of Higgs, but if anything Higgs’ demeanour is calm, soothing and relaxed and demonstrates he could easily have a teaching approach that would engage most youngsters into the mystic arts.