Review Summary: Intense and surprisingly thought provoking, Iron Lung's debut is well worth listening to for any hardcore punk, grind or powerviolence fan looking for something with plenty of replay value.
Medical themes in the hardcore and grind genres are primarily used to shock. Groups such as General Surgery use imagery of gore and surgical procedure to disgust their audience (and more importantly their detractors); Haemorrhage take this one step further and use detailed descriptions of obscure conditions, a lot of which probably require being a medical professional or making liberal usage of Wikipedia to understand completely. Two-piece Reno outfit Iron Lung do things slightly differently on their debut full-length, opting instead to mix cold, mechanical processes with harrowing insights into the lives, mindsets and deaths of those kept alive by the eponymous respiratory device. The results are far more affecting.
Simply put, the iron lung is an apparatus that works by constantly fluctuating the air pressure inside an airtight chamber, allowing the patient inside to breathe more or less as they would otherwise be able to. They were most popular during the 1940's and 1950's at the height of the polio outbreak as, in the most serious cases, the muscles surrounding the ribcage would be weakened to the point that breathing would become almost impossible. However, as effective at keeping victims alive as it was, the reality of life was that most would never be able to leave the chamber; 'Life. Iron Lung. Death.' primarily focuses on these cases. Tracks such as 'Paralyzed Words' deal with the depression and pain of being a long-term user, whilst 'A Grim Possibility For Owen Moses' through context implies the probable life for a newborn premature baby, born immediately into a world where he wouldn't know a different life from surgery and pneumatic whooshes. Several tracks also look into what the actual meaning of life entails - although most of these show life in an iron lung to be essentially waiting for death, some positivity is to be found on the track 'Thankful', where a woman is documented to have lived in one for 50 years yet claims to have had a 'good life'. Combined with tracks detailing the calibrations and mechanisms inside, the final product is one that triggers a surprising amount of thought about the topic in question.
In terms of music, this is a fairly standard (albeit well-produced) powerviolence album. The most obvious tell of this are the track lengths - all 20 tracks are over in less than 17 minutes, the longest of which clocking in at a mere 90 seconds. In this time the only relent found is in the usage of samples taking the form of whirrs, clanks, doors and breathing to simulate living in a hospital ward. Jon Kortland's enraged vocals aren't anything new or different in the genre, although what he does is very well executed and practically unfaltering. Without a bass player, much of what is played is in mid-range registers; although towards the end of the album this approach does start to stagnate a little, it stops at roughly the right time to avoid becoming wholly repetitive and consequentially boring. What is particularly impressive is the percussive work - Jensen Ward's crazed yet accurate beats laced with fills move each song at such a pace that even given the short track lengths each one feels complete, as opposed to being akin to a musical skit. As aforementioned the production is well done with no component ever overshadowing one another, important when considering the high cymbal usage throughout.
Intense and surprisingly thought provoking, Iron Lung's debut is well worth listening to for any hardcore punk, grind or powerviolence fan looking for something with plenty of replay value. Although not a perfect album - possibly slightly too long or unvaried in parts - this still suitably satisfies an itch for something fast and uncompromising whilst also providing something far more emotional than first impressions may give. Although they surpassed this with the brilliant 'Sexless / / No Sex' 3 years later, this is something that should by no means be overlooked.
