It is now 2023 and Green Lung are about to release their third album in four short years. Now on Nuclear Blast, and with many of the dates on their forthcoming UK show sold out or upgraded to larger venues, is ‘This Heathen Land’ the point at which the band take that massive leap from the underground and into the wider recognition they deserve? Well, this ageing git who has followed them from their earliest criminally under attended shows and has tickets for the upcoming Glasgow date pinned up on the board in the living room bloody well hopes so.
The album’s ‘Intro’ gives a not so subtle hint of what is to come, a spoken piece set to some early sounding synth, like the opening narration to some cheesy seventies British horror film. Whilst that may sound like an insult, let me assure you if you ever visit my abode and see the shelves lined with classic Hammer, Amicus, Tigon, and Tyburn movies, you’ll know that it is fact meant as a compliment. Indeed, the band will definitely be missing a trick if they don’t use the track as a stage intro, the gentle received standard pronounced words being a perfect counterpoint to the bombastic opening swagger of ‘The Forest Church’, a track that shows that Green Lung really have developed a knack for writing hook laden songs that sound instantly fresh but somehow familiar enough to demand a chant along even from the first time listener. Throw into the mix a swirling organ with more than a nod to the late great John Lord and a guitar solo afire with Brian May pyrotechnics, and you really couldn’t ask for a better introduction to the ability of the band.
After such a strong opening, there is almost a danger of any following track being overshadowed, but by changing pace and mixing and matching styles, the band skilfully circumvent that danger. ‘Mountain Throne’ fires out with a far more straightforward fist pumping stomp, lashings of cocksure NWOBHM confidence being stirred into the mix alongside their normal doom laden delivery, a work out for the necks of the most stalwart of headbangers being assured. Keeping things fresh next up is ‘Maxine’, a song that is anything but ghastly, but maybe more than a little Ghostly in style, and the first non-comedy song that had me spitting out a mouthful of tea with laughter at the opening line of “Do you remember those midsummer nights at Alderley Edge?” It’s not an intrinsically funny line, and as a place with a long association to things Wiccan it’s perfectly fitting to the band’s oeuvre. However, as somebody who lived in Cheshire in the seventies as a youngster Alderley Edge was a place to go with mates to build hidey holes and hunt for discarded porno mags in the bushes, so I couldn’t help but guffaw! As for when they mention Notting Hill Gate, a place where on the same evening I was threatened by separate people with an assegai and cane cutter respectively, those memories were somewhat less fun. Anyway, enough of my reminiscing, and back to the music, and comparisons to the work of a certain masked Swedish purveyor of Satanic pop is inevitable, both clearly sharing similar influences such as Blue Oyster Cult, and mixing classic occult rock with accessible beats to get those for whom the concept of liking Heavy Metal is an anathema tapping their feet and dancing along. Worry not though devotees of Doom, you will be able to shake off the fun and revel in the gloom with ‘One For Sorrow’, bringing as it does some full on Sabbath worship in a track bereft of the supernatural and fully rooted in the shadows found within the minds of humanity. The darkness continues, but without the wail of distorted guitars and over-driven amps in ‘Song of the Stones’, the simple folk structure giving it the feel of a number lost from the soundtrack of that all time classic ‘The Wicker Man’, rediscovered and recorded for this year’s 50th anniversary, and it would be so easy to imagine the late Sergeant Howie starring aghast at the inhabitants of Summerisle singing this gentle refrain at The Green Man Inn.
As ever, when given early access to an album that genuinely excites me, I’ve rambled and become far too verbose, and I don’t want to put any reader off the album by going on and on. Suffice to say that the hard rocking ‘The Ancient Ways’, ‘Hunters In The Sky’ and Prog laden ‘Oceans Of Time’ do not in any way lack in quality and stand on their own merits and I could easily double the length of this review by singing their praises. Instead, let me just say that ‘This Heathen Land’ has Green Lung building on the momentum they’ve already built with their previous release ‘Black Harvest’, and if there’s even a single iota of fairness in the world of music, it should elevate them to a new level of success.
(9/10 Spenny)
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