You could be forgiven for thinking you’ve heard something very like WH Lung’s debut album before, in the not too distant past. Incidental Music offers insistent, driving, pulsing rhythms across long songs. Marching synthesisers move those songs along, picking up the pace and tying it all together. There are wails of guitar, a high, slightly quavering lead voice and a sense that this is psychedelia reconfigured for modern times: anxious, not beatific. It is, to be frank, not a million miles from what Hookworms were doing before their split.
The 10-minute opener, Simpatico People, showcases the Manchester trio’s strengths – their grasp of dynamics, of the need to build and release tension – and serves as a grand statement of quite how good they can be at manipulating a simple theme into something ever-morphing. The tense and nervous Inspiration! has an awry lyricism that suggests singer Joseph E – all three go for initials, rather than surnames – could become a really interesting writer: “Mr P and his three-faced embassy / Walk hand in hand to a human parliament / Chanting, ‘We got qualms with the rich, qualms with the ill, qualms with the poor.” It’s not perfect: Empty Room, bang in the middle of the album, is presumably intended to change the pace, but tends rather to the cumbersome and plodding. But that’s easy to forgive when it’s followed by the eight ecstatic minutes of Nothing Is, modern maximalist psychedelia at its best. Incidental Music is like a rollercoaster ride you want to get straight back on and do all over again.
