Well, the holidays are over and the winter solstice was just a few weeks ago, so that means that we here in the Northern Hemisphere are officially in the coldest and darkest days of winter. Historically, shorter days meant less time working outside and more time at home surrounded by the warmth of family and fireplace. For generations, European winter nights consisted of ghost stories and spooky tales of haunted folklore told around the glow of the hearthlight. In North America, scary stories are modernly thought of as a strictly Halloween affair, but throughout the United Kingdom the tradition of Yuletide and wintertime horror has and remains a firm cultural institution. The telling of tales of ghosts and ghouls in Victoria England was an oral pastime before the industrial revolution pushed the country's creepy Christmas yarns beyond the fireplace. One need only look as far as Charles Dickens' classic, A Christmas Carol, or The BBC's A Ghost Story For Christmas, which was an annual supernatural television series event that aired throughout the 1970's. It makes sense when you think of the dreary and dead landscape of winter and the natural inclination to populate it with specters of the dead. And when it comes to specters, this House of Grindcore has its resident spooks in the form of Toronto, Ontario's Phantom Lung.
Phantom Lung's debut EP, Abhorrent Entity, was originally reviewed here in 2023. Since that initial 2023 release the band released two more EP's that same year—Abhorrent Entity II: Moribund and Abhorrent Entity III: Solivagant. The Abhorrent Entity trilogy was an interesting way of releasing essentially an album in the form of a triptych that, while still encompassing a central concept, released its movements far enough apart that the band's quick evolution is charted from first to last. It is an organic take on what could have easily been just another series of digital releases.
2025 finds Phantom Lung thawing out from their Great White Northern freeze of 2024's dormancy. Yet, even though 2024 didn't have the volume of releases as the year prior, the band spent the year focusing on live shows and writing new material for an upcoming full-length album.
As a show of good faith—that isn't just an obligatory band announcement of "big things coming"—our favorite grindcore phantoms have done us one better and released a foretaste of what they have been working on. "Starving to Serve" is a demo version of a single that will be part of a new album set to release sometime in the spring, hopefully.
The freshly posted "Starving to Serve" is a minute long blast of sprinting, pounding grindcore delirium. Phantom Lung are a band that does things at their own pace and often take their time easing listeners into songs, but from note one, "Starving to Serve" kicks off in a cacophony of distortion, blast beats and screaming. The track wastes no time getting into things. The drums are a perpetual hammering that do little in the way of letting up. When not straight blasting, the drums are a mechanical omnipresent obsessive pounding. The hardcore dawdling is kept to a minimum, leaving the song very lean and base. Compared to the two and three minute long songs on Abhorrent Entity III: Solivagant, this single track is a more streamlined version of Phantom Lung and I am all for it.
Phantom Lung's vocals are as rabid and deranged as ever. Through my experience with the band, I've come to find Andy Dinner's vocal performance as a maniacal, unhinged, sort of scornful prattling. Subsequent songs in the Abhorrent Entity trilogy even hosted some vocals that were more on the cleaner side of things, yet still came off as sneering and taunting. However, the vocals on "Starving to Serve" are again leaning more towards that rawboned, singularly focused style like that in the drums. The vocals are unexpectedly binary, but once again, you will hear no complaints from me.
What makes this song differ the most from the band's previous discography is the addition of a guest vocalist. The guttural lows in the latter half of "Starving to Serve" were courtesy of Brian Ortiz of the California Aztec/tribal themed death/doom metal band, Tzompantli. Phantom Lung became enamored with Tzompantli and their 2022 album, Tlazcaltiliztli—an album that made Decibel Magazines' top forty albums of the year. After Phantom Lung dropped into Tzompantli's DM's, a year-long friendly dialogue between the band and Ortiz led to "Starving to Serve's" collaborative vocal set. Ortiz's vocals fit well and are given the spotlight they deserve.
Lyrically, "Starving to Serve" is the first stab from what is promised to be an album of a whetted critique of Canada's systematic political and economical deterioration. Dinner's disillusion with the country's leadership is very real and very distressing, and I think it is a frustration felt on both sides of the border. Phantom Lung's upcoming album will definitely have a Rod Serling meets George Orwell political sort of a sinisterly surrealistic theme.
Generally, I enjoyed "Starving to Serve." I appreciate the straightforward, death-grind minimalism of it. Phantom Lung seem like they are pissed off something awful and don't have time for pleasantries or ambient vibes. They are grinding it out on this track; only slowing things down in the slightest to keep things heavy and somber. My only real criticism of "Starving to Serve" would be the fact that it is just a demo—at least the version that I heard. The guitars are a bit muddied in the mix and kind of subscribe to that cloudy jet engine sound. The riffs and instruments are discernable, but not to the standard of the previously released Abhorrent Entity EP's. But hey, it works for Deterioration. Some things seem un-flourished and might simply be acting as placeholders for now, or this might just be part of that new lean and feral Phantom Lung songwriting.
The band is either currently in the studio or soon will be at the time of this review and an album version of "Starving to Serve" is on the horizon. If this new track is any indication of the direction that Phantom Lung is going, then I think the upcoming full-length should be the band's fiercest material yet. It seems as if the cold, dark, desolate days of winter will last well into the spring and summer of 2025.
FFO: Vermintide, Vermin Womb, The Arson Project
Listen to the song: https://phantomlung.bandcamp.com/track/starving-to-serve-feat-tzompantli-demo
No comments:
Post a Comment