Review Summary: Crop me if you’ve heard this one before
Move over, Tobias Forge! There's a new spooky-ooky camptastic retro metal band in town, and they're here to do the sorts of things retro metal bands are supposed to do: serve up big-sounding riffs and soaring epic choruses, and generally hearken back of the good old melodic days of bands like Pentagram and Witchfinder General, before all this bellowing blast beat nonsense mucked everything up and made your family reluctant to pass you the aux on road trips. Yes, Green Lung is their name and doom-y stoner-y occult psych is their game. Their guitars are fuzzed 'n' dirty but their vocals they are CLEAN, and all their lyrics about ritual murder and Satan worship are safely cloaked behind enough cheesed-up singalong hooks and simmering Hammond organs to reduce the overall impression to little more than charming make-believe, the sort of thing perfect for soundtracking all your impending Halloween parties. Their 2019 debut
Woodland Rites established their ability to dependably execute this recipe, and
Black Harvest only reinforces it. If I’m making all this sound a little perfunctory, that’s because it sort of is;
Black Harvest is as unambitious as it is satisfying. Though their skill and panache for nailing the fundamentals of Sabbathian doomrock leads to a uniformly listenable and occasionally invigorating 43 minutes, Green Lung’s limited interest in expanding on those fundamentals keeps them planted firmly in the realm of fun-but-inessential throwbacks, ably providing nostalgic jaunts down memory lane but not a whole lot else.
That aforementioned lack of ambition has two major caveats: both side A and side B end with a spacious slower-burn that shows Green Lung may actually have potential comparable to their ‘70s heroes. “Graveyard Sun” opens with melancholic acoustics before bursting into a keyboard-laden power ballad full of delightfully devilish B-horror lines like “a little death never hurt anyone”. But even that can scarcely hold a candle to the album’s greatest triumph, closer “Born to a Dying World”. Compared to the 9 tracks preceding it, it’s revelatory: frontman Tom Templar delivers by far his finest vocal performance to date, and the imagery turns from eerie to outright apocalyptic, all rising seas and forests on fire and new dawns that bring no light. It’s a song that uses the vocabulary of classic metal to spin a decidedly of-the-moment yarn. Where the all-consuming maw of doomsday was a heady thought experiment 45 years ago, now it’s a tangible threat we all must contend with every day, and Templar gives a raw, bloodcurdling fearfulness to the lyrics here, intoning that “the seasons they all seem the same / no sunshine, no rain” as his bandmates bash away with cataclysmic force. It ultimately serves as a bit of a double-edged sword, ending the album on an undeniable high note but also making the rest of the album seem even more derivative than it already did. It’s a tantalizing taste of how this band might grow in years to come, and in comparison, the more straightforward stuff here comes off like empty calories.
Still, even empty calories can be pretty damn tasty, and Green Lung do occasionally manage to put a bit of real shine back in the tried-and-true formulas they deploy across
Black Harvest. Namely, “Leaders of the Blind” spices up its lumbering groove with a kickier verse that makes the song feel like more a synthesis of two distinct flavors of doom than a straight-ahead tribute, and the swinging group-vocals of “Old Gods” provide one of the catchiest moments across the tracklist. Organist John Wright’s contributions also deserve special mention here: they’re excellent across the board, and of all the band members he arguably benefits the most from the warm, full production sound. Whenever he get a moment in the spotlight, he delivers with aplomb, adding a soulful edge to the band that they would likely be far more plain-sounding without.
Elsewhere, however,
Black Harvest becomes decidedly more mired in clichés. “Reaper’s Scythe” trots out stomping Elder-lite riffs and portentous warnings of death the way you’ve likely heard a dozen-plus bands in this vein do already, with nary a twist to speak of. More pressingly, after the halfway mark the album really starts to drag, with song after song settling into samey, predictable, midtempo chugs with only a handful of admittedly good guitar solos to break up the monotony. Though each and every riff lands the way it ought to, there just isn’t enough variety in speed, volume, or mode to keep them from all blurring together, and the hooks mostly only stick enough to bob your head to 'em while they last without leaving much of an impression afterwards. It’s never unpleasant and it gets the job done, but anyone searching for a reason to listen to this instead of, say, Pagan Altar, may find their patience tested before “Born to a Dying World” finally kicks things into gear again.
Ultimately, your personal enjoyment of
Black Harvest will largely depend on your enjoyment of the bands they imitate and your tolerance for unabashed retro sensibilities. Many Sabbath-keepers and Dio devotees will likely find this scratches all their particular itches with style and conviction, and many others will probably dismiss it as the same cheap nostalgia-baiting already soured by the likes of Greta Van Fleet and Wolfmother. Sure, the vast majority of what this band does is not uniquely theirs, but I think they still show enough enthusiasm and flair to earn their little place in the metal world. Green Lung have here offered enough hints at something more unique and piercing to make me hopeful that this is only the beginning of a creative and dynamic career- even if their overall M.O. is such that I wouldn’t hold my breath.
