LANTERN are without a doubt one of the top bands to call Philadelphia their home. Their latest cassette titled Dream Mine on Bathetic Records is all the proof you could ever need.
This cassette offers us a wild mixture of haunting experimental soundscapes scattered around a slew of head-splitting proto-punk meltdowns. As you could probably guess, yes, this makes for quite a challenging listen as they offer this bizarre dichotomy of sounds. A track like “Fool’s Gold” just might be one of the most memorable with it’s infinitely gruesome qualities. Other tracks like “Untitled” have a weird sci-fi edge that puts them into a similar vein with the rest of these troubling soundscapes, while a blood-boiling and anthemic track like “Out of Our Heads” truly sets the tone for the cassette (or at least for parts of it) with its shredded guitars and fiery temper.
Aside from these, we have other snarling tracks like “Dream Mine” or “You Can’t Deny Me (Revisited)” which sounds like a clangorous metallic mess suffering a catastrophic meltdown. Later we get another blown-out bruiser in “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” This track features a perpetually throbbing bass lines that drills itself repeatedly into your skull, which in other words, it sounds like a continuously downward spiral into the bowels of hell. On top of that, Zach Fairbrother graces our ears with some ridiculously acetic and fuzzed-out soloing, simultaneously heating this track into a bubbling boil. Following this we get one last beat-down in “The Dogs,” which is a truly relentless garage-punk stomper covered in a thick, sloppy layer of gunk and grit. This leads us into the finale “Train Song,” where a finally audible Zach Fairbrother guides us through the train station until the end of the cassette.
If you haven’t taken a moment to check this stuff out, start with these tracks below or just go give the whole cassette a listen on the Lantern Bandcamp.
My Rating: SS
Genre/ Tags: Experimental, Lo-Fi, Psychedelic, Post-Punk, Grunge
Dream Mine CS: Tracklist:
1.) Don’t Say Much
2.) Out of Our Heads
3.) Dream Mine
4.) Fool’s Gold
5.) Untitled
6.) You Can’t Deny Me (Revisited)
7.) I Wanna Be Your Dog
8.) The Dogs
9.) Train Song
BUY the cassette directly from Bathetic Records – only $5 !
Lantern on Bandcamp
Lantern on Tumblr
Past Related Posts:
Burned Youth CS (Night People)
Heavy Times, Brain Idea, Lantern Live in Philly (11/19/11)
Styrofoam Drone 
Great that you wrote about these guys, they can do no wrong in my book. All of their releases that I’ve heard have been amazing, and they just get better and better with subsequent listens, for those of us who like the stranger stuff.
totally agreed.