After experiencing a tumultuous experience that pushed the band away from their cloudy soundscapes, they find magnificence in trodding within grounded soil. ‘No Paradise’ is not just a pivot of their dream pop and alt-country sound to more immediately sharper textures and melodies, but also an expansion of Audrey Kang’s writing that allows her existential introspection to delve deeper into deeply felt territory. Emotionally and melodically impressive in every way, the band has emerged with their most phenomenal album to date.
Lightning Bug’s 9-year run as a band started with the reflection on one’s conscience and existence. What keeps them going forward? What put them to find peace in every passing moment? What is their reason to look back into the past and move forward into the future? The band thoroughly processes their existential selves interspersed with dreams, memories, and feelings that they sprinkled all over their strands of hazy alt-country, dream pop, and ambient passages on their first 2 albums, before eventually putting more expanding upon those tones with polish on compositions and textures as they step closer towards grasping an acceptance of peaceful feeling on ‘A Color of the Sky’. Now that the feeling is grasped, it deepens Lightning Bug’s scope even further, jumping off that moving into grounded territory as they explore their existential wonders more in ‘No Paradise’.
Throughout the record, the band’s usual hazy aptitude starts to dissipate, stooping for an immediate soundscape as the band dives into the abyss once more, where their reflections toward life have taken a swerve due to Audrey Kang’s experience with violence that put the band in a different state of mind. In exploring those ruminating emotions, the soundscape opens up to provide Audrey Kang’s sharp and dynamic vocals peer through the darkness, with the overall blend of alt-country and dream pop flourishes taking more leaps in terms of their compositional layers and sweeping production. It still has that dreamy curtain, but it’s now purposed to echo around that dark expanse, reflected further with the band’s most compositional immense songs to date, strengthened even more by the flow and structure of this album. The reverb touches that allowed the alt-country flourish of ‘On Paradise’ and ‘The Flowering’ let Audrey’s vocals soar on those hooks, the rapid drums of ‘The Quickening’ that build up to that chorale-backed chorus, the sorrowful tinge from Audrey’s morose performance that’s accompanied by the dour guitars and drums on ‘Opus’, the trip-hop esque escapade of ‘Serenade’ with the punchy percussion, looming theremin, and curious guitar passages that allowed Audrey’s voice to be surrounded in mystique, the soft and gentle instrumentation that are shown through the presence of pianos and strings on ‘December Song’ and the solemn pedal steel on ‘No Paradise’, and the one-two punch of the string accented ‘Lullaby for Love’ where the heavenly melodies just keep building up to more layers of grandeur, just before the choppy vocal fragments lead to the evocative glides of ‘I Feel…’ where the repetitive expressive refrains of “I Feel” is amplified not just by Audrey Kang’s impressive vocal expressions, but also through those charged sparks of guitars and drums that shuffle from start to finish. Even with the briefness and extensiveness of ‘The Withering’ and ‘Morrow Song’ respectively, they still pop off despite the fleeting melody of the former that could have been stretched out a bit more and the need for more melodic layers of the latter that despite the crisp drum work, the jangling repetition starts to drag out than it should be.
Through that traumatic experience that shook Audrey Kang, she muses about her existence even more deeply, shown through her writing that embraces more layers of detail and imagery than ever before. That in itself allows her poetry to speak more emotional depth, as it overall presents her coming out of that chaotic situation and then touching upon the aspects of her life that move her through and through, coiling imageries of nature in accepting the finite state of life, the beauty that comes from feeling love and observing nature around her, and embracing the limits that come through living within the continuous cycle of time, where she will accept the moments that she has experienced in the past and will experience in the future. Yet, despite that calming sense of acceptance, there are still questions about her own legacy that linger, where she reflects on whether or not the songs that she has made will last and will be remembered, especially when the last song describes her thoughts of writing about the feeling of love and questioning whether or not that will be heard. It might feel uncertain, but there is still hope that she clings onto, as she writes and sings in the last few lines of the second chorus of ‘No Paradise’. “So dimly alive / But Alive”. It represents the possibility that might be far-reaching, but it’s not impossible to get to it someday as the music itself will echo and find its way to that speck of light, where that feeling of love that Audrey Kang yearns to have will be within her reach.
‘No Paradise’, as the album title implies, is a project where the band grapples with the harrowing state of the world that throws its darkness on them, pulling them away from the skies and placing them into the grounded land. It might change them altogether, yet it doesn’t shake them away as they have dug deeper into the soil and emerged with their best collection of songs to date, all with an expansion of Audrey Kang’s poetry where the details offer more emotional depth toward her introspective musings towards life, combined with production that still has that dream pop haze but gets into more evocative territory that comes from the mixing that puts the vocals and instrumentation on the forefront and melodies that are refined to become strikingly immediate, beautiful, and tight all around. There may be no paradise found in walking through dry land, but the beauty of life and nature that is revealed all around you is definitely worth the venture.
Favorite Tracks: ‘On Paradise’, ‘The Quickening’, ‘The Flowering’, ‘Opus’, ‘December Song’, ‘Serenade’, ‘Lullaby for Love’, ‘I Feel…’, ‘Just Above My Head’, ‘No Paradise’
Least Favorite Track: ‘Morrow Song’