The Blinding Light were an extremely bright flash in the pan from the late 00s metalcore scene who released a couple of dazzlingly raw sludge-caked mathy metalcore albums before vanishing into obscurity and/or darkness. The latter is named
Junebug, which two minutes of haphazard Google research tells me with approximately 25% certainty is the name for several beetles with the common characteristic of an unerring attraction to light. Like a lot of bugs, they will fly towards strong sources of light with reckless abandon. In a way, maybe you could say that they find light to be blinding?
Because any attempts to find information about this band largely dead-end at endearingly myspace era pictures of them sweat-soaked and contorted in long-lost performance, it's unclear if band and album name were deliberately riffing on one another. What can be said unequivocally about this band and riffing though is that
Junebug is packed to the brim with massive ones. Even sub-minute-and-a-half opener "White Flag" surrenders a fistful of abacus-shattering chugs that careen into caustic sludge sluggers and back again with the deceptive grace of a heavyweight boxer. Despite an inclination towards dissonance, on tracks like the addictive "BLVD" the tone of the guitar does a lot of work in comparison to their slightly rawer and chunkier debut; the riffs often lean heavily into the catchier side of sludge with an almost southern fried flavour - think riffs from
Hot Damn! as protracted monologues rather than frantic non-sequiturs. If it's not obvious, the songwriting is definitely dominated by the guitar due to the almost overabundance of riffs, but is tempered by the endlessly punchy drums and a lung capacity redefining vocal performance.
A more classic hardcore background from the ex-Threadbare vocalist is audible in his very raw and tireless style that abrades effectively against the catchy/crushing riff offerings and brings breathless energy to the arrangements with screams that frequently last far longer than they have any right to. It goes without saying that
Junebug is mostly concerned with intensity, but there are numerous atmospheric, (relatively) more subdued sections that intersperse the album, with melodic leads or patient chugs laid beneath softer, almost psychedelic droning murmurs and other dreamlike effects. These parts might be jarring on first listen but are actually fairly seamless, with the best examples of such transitions being midway through "Holy Ghost" and the last stretch of the title track.
Deciphering the nowhere-to-be-found-online lyrics is a rewarding if mostly impossible challenge, with some great lines that would be slapstick if they weren't so ferocious, like "I'm gonna be a tombstone! YEAAH!!!!" from the gravitational "Void". Returning to that earlier pondering about the name of the album, one (and only parsable) line from the colossally conclusive title track seems fairly prophetic for an album from 2009 - "stuck to the screen". Who is this humble being unable to tear itself away from that intoxicating light? One crucial piece of information about the band is that they went through significant lineup changes through their short and seemingly turbulent career. To that end, maybe this meta relationship between band and album name is meant as an acceptance of the inevitability of the band's own self-destruction. Or maybe they just thought bugs are cool. Who knows, the riffs are good.
