Pre-order of No Paradise. You get 2 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
Purchasable with gift card
releases May 2, 2024
$8USD or more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
We're rotating our physical album covers to feature different artists.
50 available for this limited edition featuring a collaborative work
by *Lina Sun Park and David Brandon Geeting*
Includes digital pre-order of No Paradise.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
shipping out on or around May 2, 2024
edition of 50
Purchasable with gift card
$32USDor more
Tonje Thilesen Limited Edition Vinyl
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
We're rotating our physical album covers to feature different artists. Limited edition of 50.
Includes digital pre-order of No Paradise.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
The winter rains fell for seven weeks straight
And no one was sure it would ever abate
We took shelter indoors and awaited the sun
But weeks turned to years and the sun didn't come
It didn’t come…
How soft
Softly we turn
Turn into dust
The faster that we burn…
Now low lies the moon, its light fading fast
O’er faraway hills of cinnamon grass
As we dim into dusk, dissolve into past
We say, “Nothing good in this life is meant to last…”
Could it ever last?
How soft
Softly we burn
Burn into dust
The faster that we turn…
Under any hand but yours my heart won’t beat
Only you can rouse me from my sleep
So I dream of fertile earth and tender breeze
And I’ll keep dreaming till I am summoned back to life by your heat
I wish the gods would turn me into a tree
But keep my mind distinct, alive, and free
My trunk will thicken with ring after ring
My fingertips will blossom in the spring
I’ll grow branches supple and strong for you to climb
I will raise you ever closer to the sky
Beneath my shade you’ll pass the time
And in the fall you’ll watch me lose my mind
My leaves will paint the ground below with red
As one by one they tumble from my head
Till just my lonely skeleton is left
And in my bareness you will think me dead
Under any hand but yours my heart won’t beat
Only you can rouse me from my sleep
So I dream of fertile earth and tender breeze
And I’ll keep dreaming till I’m summoned back to life by your heat.
7.
Serenade
8.
Lullaby for Love
9.
I Feel...
10.
Morrow Song
11.
Just Above My Head
12.
No Paradise
credits
releases May 2, 2024
Written, performed, produced, engineered by Lightning Bug
at Science is Magic Studios in Arlington, VT
Lightning Bug is Logan Miley, Kevin Copeland, Dane Hagen, and Audrey Kang
Mixed by Logan Miley
Mastered by Heba Kadry
Harmony with Allegra Krieger on The Withering
Soundplay with Woody Ray on Morrow Song
_______________________________________
The poet Louise Glück once wrote “whatever/ returns from oblivion/returns to find a voice.” "No Paradise", Lightning Bug’s fourth album, is the band’s return from oblivion. After harrowing encounters with violence and the subsequent emotional wreckage, frontwoman Audrey Kang understood the world and she were permanently altered since the group’s last album "A Color of the Sky". If that album was celestial, this is terrestrial, rooted in the dirt, the muck, the marrow of ephemeral life. It explores the vast landscape of darkness that threatens to envelop us all, but revels in the fault lines through which light shines, shimmers, guides us to something like salvation. Band members and friends Kevin Copeland (guitars and bass), Logan Miley (cello and synth), and Dane Hagen (drums and percussion) provide expressive yet precise emotionality to the in-between feelings that language fails to identify, and which the heart may feel ashamed to claim as its own.
Like the taboos of yore, Audrey employs mythology to guide her voice through the murky trenches of lust, despair, self-abandon, and love. On "December Song", which has the aural sensation of a waking dream, she recontextualizes the tale of Persephone’s banishment to the underworld to characterize the depths of depression. On "Opus", a track that has the compact ferocity of an oncoming storm, Audrey writes of a myth that is all her own but rings ancestral: “the winter rains fell for seven weeks straight/ and no one was sure it would ever abate/ we took shelter indoors and awaited the sun/ but weeks turned to years and the sun didn't come.” "The Withering" (with accompanying vocals by Allegra Krieger), like a folk tale, contains the intoxicating blend of childish rhyme and the sly wisdom of evil’s imminence. There is the constant feeling that Audrey is shepherding you through the legends of a world long forgotten but still intimately felt; it conjures the moment of profound recognition when one stumbles upon a children’s drawing from thousands of years ago and understands that time, history, what we’ve felt and will always feel, belong to one all-encompassing portal. This is most prescient on "Morrow Song" (featuring additional production by Woody Ray), which has the DNA of an ancient sailor’s chant and the contemporary vibrancy of the great folk songs.
The natural world is both sonically and narratively illuminated throughout the record, but at the center of the blossoming, the withering, the quaking, the darkening, the boundlessness of the world around us, what remains most urgent and thrilling is Audrey’s poetry of prose and voice. Guided by her, we are given permission to enter a space that offers no false hope or appeasing epiphanies about how to survive; instead we are asked to survive alongside her as she, on "The Quickening", communes the self and body in pleasure, relinquishes the cerebral to return to a place of instinctual rapture on “I Feel” (interwoven with samples from interviews of uncompromising women ranging from Nina Simone to Virgina Woolf to Doja Cat), and struggles with the opposing intuitions of life’s inherent futility and the artist’s call to intimacy, hope, and aliveness. The musicians of Lightning Bug have always understood how to capture euphoric highs and existential lows, but it’s on "No Paradise" that the fickleness of fate and the mettle of the human spirit are rendered exquisitely through Logan’s sweeping strings, Kevin’s anthemic guitars, and Dane’s ecstatic rhythms that emulate everything from the sporadic tempos of a racing mind to the calming cadence of a body at rest. This is an album that is concerned with the idea of hope as not a respite but a call to action; a cry from the inside of one’s inside to protect beauty in an increasingly ugly world, as Audrey struggles to reconcile on "No Paradise": “to keep that feeling of sky/pressed between words/it can’t be done/so why do i try?”
This is also Lightning Bug’s first album since leaving Fat Possum to go entirely independent. And, as usual, the band has taken it upon themselves to make their creative process a self-sufficient musical microcosm in which they are capable of anything, from playing every instrument we hear, including string arrangements, to producing, engineering, and recording. Kevin built the very studio the album was recorded in; no one but Logan is trusted to mix the songs; the band relies on Dane’s inventive rhythms to form the music’s emotional spine. The three musical powerhouses around Audrey act as a spiritual and literal home for her voice, a safe haven in which uncompromised collaboration reigns, where no artist must bend their nature to sacrifice. Within that I see another process of enduring hope, a belief in their music to transcend and reach audiences despite having to do it all on their own. With "No Paradise", Lightning Bug brings us back down to earth, where now the clouds are nothing more than an apathetic congregation. But fear not. Below us is a beating heart demanding to be heard.
Shoegaze ist die Kunst des Dröhnens, doch „Everything Is Alive“ setzt diese Elemente nur sparsam ein. Statt Hall- und Zerr-Sounds aufzutürmen, schäumt die Musik in feinen Bläschen über.
https://tortue.substack.com/i/140348114/slowdive-everything-is-alive-dead-oceans Daniel Welsch
