Deep Fantasy by White Lung takes off like a burning trail of black gun powder leading to a sonic bomb blast. It’s 22 minutes–a quick toxic burn over the horizon–ten crushing songs of grating, apocalyptic punk rock, each under three minutes long. No seconds are spared.
“Drown With The Monster” cracks open the album with the intent of making the walls in your room shake. Feedback squall circles the drums like beasts of prey. “Sycophant” is driven by panic and sounds like buildings falling.
Deep Fantasy is the Vancouver group’s third album and their first for Domino Records. Mish Way unhinges her jaw, Kenneth William shreds the guitar, Anne-Marie Vassiliou splats the drums and Hether Fortune chokes the bass. Their last album was Sorry in 2012.
The group expertly pack in full, winding song structures in their limited scope. At the first clack of each drum stick the songs explode, then shift into crushing punk rock blows to the head.
On “Lucky One,” maybe the best song in a pointless race between songs, the guitars chomp down like saliva-dripping panther fangs. “You are the lucky one and I’m a dyin’ breed,” Way wails, her voice crackling like an isolated flame.
Mish Way is one of the fiercest, unforgiving, fist-in-the-air, fist-down-your-throat singers to spit in the recording booth in a while. She unleashes the energy of anxiety, frustration, doubt and discontent whenever her mouth opens.
Way’s voice can intimidate at a lowly Joan Jett grumble or squawk like yellow-haired Bubbles from The Powerpuff Girls. She takes Deep Fantasy beyond the expected energy of any punk rock record and adds to it the vicious poetry of the bitter heart. “Despite of me losing my mind / All the world’s pretend,” she sings on “Face Down,” “I seem to be on the valley / Of the weak and damned.”
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