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.
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