Lungfish
Punk’s devotional element is a crucial part of its myth. Hell, it is the myth–after your first punk epiphany, you’re supposed to realize you’ve found the one true Way. Of course, in reality most punk bands can’t deliver three-chord transcendence on a consistent basis.
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A veteran of the late-80s and early-90s performance-poetry scene, Higgs is 36 going on infinity. He cuts a striking figure with his rabbinical beard, myriad tattoos, and head-to-toe heavy clothing (he’s been known to wear two pairs of pants at once). Onstage, in front of the pathologically repetitious guitar-bass-drums drone of Asa Osborne, Nathan Bell, and Mitchell Feldstein, he’s riveting; if he’s not standing stock-still, he’s fiendishly contorting his face or trying to climb an invisible ladder. Sometimes he’s a preacher, preaching the gospel according to the plants and the animals; sometimes he’s the flowers themselves, opening their mouths and screaming.
Like a mystic version of the Fall, Lungfish know how to wring every ounce of power and majesty out of their chosen form, and for a while each new album was a chapter in a massive poem-prayer. The dark, obscure Indivisible, from 1997, and 1998’s desolate, paranoid Artificial Horizon (which starts with a tune called “Black Helicopters”) are considered by some devout Lungfish fans the band’s best work, but I find Higgs’s scorched-earth worldview hard to take in such large doses. “Don’t shun the world, shed it” goes one song; “Oppress yourself!” Higgs screams on another. Oh, and on “Ann the Word” our narrator vomits up a blinking eye. You might read that on paper as a metaphor for the rebirth of cognizance or something, but the tempo is so uniformly sludgy and Higgs’s voice so craggy that the band still sounds dead on its feet.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Antonia Tricarico.
