Newcastle’s most epic band have said they want parts of this to sound like diving into the deepest parts of their dreams, and other parts to sound like coming up for air.
That’s a big ask for any producer, but the band’s own guitarist Paul Gregory pulls it off. You can hear all their strengths and vulnerabilities at play in the song Faultlines, which ebbs and flows from gale force to fluttering breeze. Clearly influenced by 90s acts like Cranes and Mazzy Star, Lanterns push hard at the walls of sound, happy to bring the roof down if that offers fresh vistas. Their third album in five years doesn’t boast an opener as fearsome as Elodie from their previous release, 2013’s Until The Colours Run. Instead, this one moves like clouds through a series of moods, some forthright, some withdrawn. Vocalist Hazel Wilde sings songs of self-rejuvenation, of courage and of the angst of this austere age. In I’ll Stall Them she cries, ‘Give me a good day, I want to feel human’. Yet it’s the very committed melodrama and ambition of Beings which asserts its humanity and spirit. If in spells it’s nebulous, an inkblot test for what you choose to read into it, its raw presence is indisputable.
