White Lung aren’t subtle—but then again, neither is the doorman who assumes every woman with a band is either a groupie or the merch girl. Nor is your average comments section in response to just about any article posted about a female artist. Nor are the standards of physical beauty, relationship dynamics, and personal happiness promulgated by pop culture. Nor is drug addiction. Nor is the #notallmen hashtag. Nor is questioning Sky Ferreira about how much her breasts are responsible for her success, nor are authorities liable to ask “what were you wearing” to every accuser of sexual assault. White Lung’s bracing third LP Deep Fantasy is a product of its environment, that environment being “the real world in 2014,” filled with people who refuse to be a part of the solution because they won’t even admit there’s a problem.
So, White Lung are not subtle. But Deep Fantasy is definitely savvy, ensuring its staunch ideals are delivered by a riveting, relatable frontwoman and 22 minutes of vicious, compact musicianship and addictive melody. It’s an uncompromising feminist punk record that can be grasped by anyone who finds themselves compelled by kickass rock music and basic human decency.
The importance of White Lung’s potential reach can’t be overstated. Formative influence Courtney Love has specifically expressed hope for White Lung to “achieve some kind of mainstream success”, noting, “It means there are more people listening, and you're affecting the zeitgeist more.” It’s hard to imagine a rock band of any kind to be allowed the platform that Hole, or even less commercially fortunate acts like L7 and Babes in Toyland, could have two decades ago. However, Deep Fantasy is being put out by the same people responsible for Animal Collective, Real Estate and Arctic Monkeys records. In 2014, this is the equivalent of a major-label debut.
The result is a best case scenario retaining the accessibility that marked White Lung’s 2012 breakthrough Sorry, while amplifying the parts that translate to a bigger stage. Sorry producer Jesse Gander returns, and he did a pretty good job last time a long-overlooked Vancouver punk band had the opportunity to put everything on the line. As on Japandroids’ Celebration Rock, the sound of Deep Fantasy is not slick so much as knife-like: piercing, bright, precise and forged under a great amount of pressure.
And it leads with the sharpest part__—__opening duo “Drown With the Monster” and “Down it Goes” assumes you’ve never heard White Lung before, and they're the best and hookiest demonstrations of what they do. These are doomed, minor-key dirges sped up to the point where they become anthemic, performed at the highest possible velocity where they can still qualify as potential pop. Anticipatory guitar roars are required to take off after Anne-Marie Vassiliou's held cymbal-crash introductions and they keep pace with a rigid, doubled-up hardcore rhythm and fill-free drumming. Mish Way often inverts typical song structure, hanging high notes perilously over sludgy, drop-D chords in the verse while she takes a lower, more menacing and tense register on the choruses. Guitarist Kenneth Williams uses technical precision for texture, as harmonics and high treble flicker like sparks from a buzzsaw against metal.
It’s thrilling, and White Lung don’t do much else from that point on. Even compared to 2014’s other high-profile, high-BPM, sub-half-hour feminist punk LP, Deep Fantasy is sonically blinkered__—__there are no ballads, no ambient noise instrumentals, and the few seconds of feedback that close the album is about as close as you get to “atmosphere.” White Lung does just about one thing musically on Deep Fantasy, but it's one thing that no one else is doing right now. Though often positioned in the lineage of bands from a time when Lollapalooza was a traveling circus, White Lung are a modern creation, their kohl-streaked punk more Black Sails in the Sunset than Black Flag. Occasionally, the cohesion of Deep Fantasy can be taxing, but for the time being, this is the band taking their sound as far as it can go.
Way's lyrics can be just as condensed as the music itself, but they're more like concentrate, expanding on contact and allowing the listener to come up with their own formulation. Considering "Drown With the Monster"'s nasty snarl of a hook, some poor sap from an energy drink company might try to mindlessly co-opt it for a commercial, which is a tribute to how open-ended “Drown” is; Way struggles with an undefined addiction and never quite says whether she’s giving in, giving up, or giving herself another chance to fight. “Down It Goes” and “Snake Jaw” are likewise dense and comprehensive, touching on the threatening imbalance in sexual pursuit (“You fear my thick skin/ I’m thinking there’s a knife”), dysmorphia ("You drag me behind/ Like bitter squirming swine"), body image (“If I get fat one day, will you run away?/ I’ll starve if you promise to save me”) and disordered eating ("Here comes my dinner now/ It's for the win").
Deep Fantasy does work best as a multimedia affair; it almost certainly requires its lyric sheet to be understood, and Way’s outside writing supplements her work rather than disenfranchising the listener of their personal interpretation. At Deep Fantasy's center, there’s one song that can be effectively heard as a straightforward demonstration of self-confidence, of friendship, of support. Way explained that it’s the one written as a reaction to rape culture, and it takes on a new, demolishing power upon the realization that its title is the last thing a sexual assault accuser is likely to hear__—__“I Believe You”.
Just about every aspect of White Lung’s music is aggressive and sounds angry and invective, though “I Believe You” stresses the resonance and empathy; while Way’s philosophical and theoretical leanings might not be considered “mainstream,” it’s a compliment to Deep Fantasy to say that none of its calls for dignity, for humanity, for understanding sounds remotely radical—rather, they’re pretty fucking rational. Plenty of people with progressive tastes in politics and pop culture still could reasonably think “feminist punk” (or any political variant of any music) isn’t something they’d necessarily enjoy listening to, and while Hole sold millions of records, surely a great deal had access to their underlying message because they saw “Miss World” jammed between Live and Candlebox videos on MTV. This is principled music, not doctrine, and while inspired by its surroundings, it’s defined by its leader making bracing art. Deep Fantasy is a product of its environment, as well as one hell of a survival guide to live through this.
