One of the few remaining survivors from the late-80s Dischord boom that also produced Jawbox, Nation of Ulysses, and Shudder to Think, Lungfish has hardly varied its slow, ruminative style since inception. Feral Hymns isn't about to break the streak-- it's another album of measured, muscular first-wave emo and metaphysical doublespeak from these elder-statesman philosopher punks. The parallel between Lungfish's songs and their career is striking: Both seem like fixed points around which time ebbs and flows, like the tide around the pilings of pier. Their stark, minimal repetitions seemed fresh and dramatic in the varied, exploratory context of late-80s DC punk music. But in 2005, it's beginning to pale-- that same steadfast aesthetic feels more like a creative rut than a statement.
It's difficult to chastise Lungfish for repeating themselves, since repetition is their métier; nevertheless, Feral Hymns, while competent, even elegant in its precise intensity, feels tepid and bloodless-- Lungfish being Lungfish without making an effort to advance their craft. All the familiar elements-- the deliberate, stately percussion; the elongated, cyclical riffs; the snarled lyrical tautologies and abstruse involutions-- are all intact. "All Creation Bows" lays abstractions like "Every surface is reflecting/ Every line is intersecting" into a deep down-tempo groove, and the triumphant unrolling motion of "You Are the War" is matched by its mythological pronouncements: "You are the winged wrist of the sun disk/ You are the first child of ancient slime." But there's nothing here to urge less fervent fans away from their more energetic and nostalgically charged back catalog.
Lungfish is about as far from dancepunk as you can get, yet the core structure of dance music is a good comparison for understanding how they arrive at their sui generis style. Dancepunk usually appropriates the trappings of dance music-- shuffle beats, robotic bass, crisp tempo-changes and dynamic shifts-- and arrays them in serial, song-oriented structures. But what really identifies dance music as such is its structural development: More vertical than lateral, achieved through variations and amplifications on a theme, not concatenated linear progression. This is exactly what Lungfish does with punk music, which is particularly apparent on instrumental tracks like "Picture Music". They stretch the basic elements of punk into long, tense arcs, where central themes are tweaked and coaxed through subtle variations. The idea is an interesting one, but even the most unique ideas have a limited shelf-life, and on Feral Hymns, one gets the sense that it's played out its possibilities. It's common to complain of one band sounding too much like another, but Lungfish has fallen into a rarer trap-- they've begun to sound too much like themselves.
